Not anytime soon. There is a different development plan that was going to be 26 stories tall (!!!). Basically the Kmart Plaza and the Whole Foods Plaza are different properties.Bluelightspecial wrote: ↑December 18th, 2023, 10:13 amAccording to the city's Planning Commission site, the project was conditionally approved in May of 2022, so looks like you are going to get that bigger Whole Foods.ClownLoach wrote: ↑December 18th, 2023, 9:37 amFor some reason the website wasn't responding when I tried to reply with this. They've been messing around with the idea of building that strip mall into high rise luxury condos and other such nonsense with a token replacement Whole Foods at surface level with some kind of subterranean parking forever. There were other developers fighting over it. My understanding is that every time a proposal comes in the greedy developers come up with something more grand and lavish but because of their greed it never gets done. They have supposedly been planning on redevelopment for over a decade. This looks like a lower intensity proposal as it maintains surface parking. As such it'll never get built when they can double the housing going all the way. I would not get excited about the 62K WFM size either as the buildings already that size have been stripped of unique features and larger SKU counts in recent years and the stores get consolidated towards the back wall to make leaseable space, a bar, and excessive seating up front. Basically the store is the same underwhelming format with extra seating. They put one of these in Long Beach at 60K and it pales in comparison to the originals built that size (El Segundo and Tustin) before they were scaled back.veteran+ wrote: ↑December 18th, 2023, 8:55 am
Oh WOW!!!!!
Thanks for that info
Over 62,000sqft for the WF? That is amazing for the area!
But...........................will all that be approved by the City? That intersection (the very busy Grove and famous Farmer's Market share that intersection) is without hyperbole a REAL nightmare. And parking for all the properties are quite awful.
P.S. 10 minute drive for a 5 mile radius????
One proposal has a shorter property with WFM moving in (the Kmart property). The other property was going to be 26 stories but has been reduced and in that case WFM stays where they are.
The Beverly-Grove neighborhood has been fighting over this forever, along with the competing developers and such.
Conditional approval doesn't mean squat, I am surrounded by conditional approvals nearly 40 years old and not built.
This site is a battleground with the neighborhood and the developers competing. These developers don't care about WFM or CVS or any of the existing tenants and just want to use them since they are currently able to get around the building codes and zoning processes in an expedited manner if they make a project "mixed use." If those laws went away tomorrow they would be trying to evict both stores to make a few extra dollars on additional housing units since the value per square foot is so much higher. This is the outcome the developers would prefer versus the approved scaled back project. It looks like Regency is trying to develop the Kmart side and move WFM over while Holland Partner is trying to develop the existing WFM side and keep them. Based on what @veteran+ has reported this Kmart deal with Regency may be dead which makes sense as it's a less intensive use than the developers would like.
And now it seems that Amazon has halted WFM development which was the point of my post. I think Amazon is waiting for the outcome of the Kroger-Albertsons deal... I would not be surprised if they submitted a bid for Albertsons to merge it with WFM if the deal is halted by the FTC.