Sale To The Highest Bidder
A few years ago, The Federal Government became sick and tired of local governments futzing around with El Toro and decided to sell it to the highest bidder. Period.

The Highest Bidder: Lennar
Lennar Corporation is one of the largest homebuilders in the U.S. and has cultivated a sub-specialty of acquiring old military bases and developing them privately. It paid $649.5 million for El Toro in a transaction that closed in July. Lennar’s operating style is one of openness, inclusion and close consultation with local communities, and they deliver it with high quality. Their reputation is superb. Let me repeat: superb.

How Lennar is Financing The Great Park
Note I stated Lennar, not the city of Irvine, is financing The Great Park, and it is three-pronged. 1) Lennar is giving a huge portion of the El Toro land to the city of Irvine. That land will become The Great Park and it will be much larger than, for example, New York’s Central Park. 2) Lennar is giving the City $200 million to build The Great Park. 3) Lennar will create an assessment district (exactly like the assessment districts The Irvine Company creates with its new villages) on its own non-gifted land to raise another $201 million for the city to build the park. So, the total budget for The Great Park is $401 million, all created or provided by Lennar.

What Lennar is Getting
In exchange for gifting the land and cash, Lennar receives guaranteed government entitlements – entitlements which will allow Lennar to build the equivalent of another “new village” in Irvine. Lennar is calling the new village The Great Park Community, and it will contain the uses common to a new village – homes, apartments, offices, R&D buildings, shopping centers and so on.

A Mental Image of The Great Park Community
Think of a miles-wide donut with a giant hole in the center. That hole is The Great Park. Around the hole is the land Lennar will develop.

What’s Next for Lennar
Lennar has bought land and government entitlements, and next must craft a specific masterplan for its private development. To do so, it has hired a world-class planning firm, EDAW. Creating the plan will be an interactive process and will include hundreds, maybe even thousands of changes large and small. This is normal, and its purpose is to create the best possible plan for The Great Park Community’s own unique and prized identity.

How The Great Park Advocates Are Organized
This also is three-pronged. 1) The city of Irvine is responsible for granting specific site-plan approvals and will react as Lennar presents various alternatives. 2) The city created The Great Park Operating Company (also called The Great Park Corp) to actually plan and build the park. The operating board consists of the five city council members and four “outside” members. It is establishing its own staff, separate from that of the city, to deal with The Great Park. 3) The Great Park Conservancy is the primary Great Park educational resource and “keeper” of the dream. It is wholly separate and independent from the city and receives no money from either the city or the Great Park Corp.

What is Next for The Great Park Operating Company?
A world-class Great Park requires world-class planning. To get it, the operating company, after a competition supervised by non-affiliated professionals, has awarded seven different architectural/land-planning firms $50,000 each to study the park and come up with ideas. The firms are from all over the world, and each realizes this is a unique opportunity to stamp its name and reputation on a project of international scope; therefore, each will spend much more than $50,000 to create conceptual ideas. The firms have been encouraged to think “outside the box.” Should The Great Park look like an English-style country park? Or a multiplicity of “places” for people to visit? Or be composed of strange and unusual structures never before seen? No one knows, but the firms thoroughly understand this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and surely will fire their creative juices to the maximum. The results will be presented this fall, after which the operating company will select the winner, which then will generate the detailed plan. In all this there is a singular goal: to create a Great Park Masterplan that will stun us with its wonder and beauty.

Merging the Masterplans
As you can see, there will be two masterplans, one created for Lennar and one created for The Park. Even if both are world-class, the overall result will not succeed unless the two plans are amalgamated as carefully as parts on a spacecraft. Thus, the Operating Corp, the city, Lennar, EDAW, and the park’s designer must work together very closely to perfect the designs, the “adjacencies” (as architects like to call them), the road, sewer, storm drain and water systems – and so on. This is very complicated stuff; it also is extraordinarily creative and thought- provoking. Finally, it is the critical phase during which “world class” planning evolves from ideas to specific architectural drawings, and thus its process should be calm, deliberative and with an eye toward the judgment of history.

Then What?
Then the entire Great Park Community will get built and we will have The Orange County Great Park. To get this far, with land dedicated to the park and $401 million of private financing assured for its construction, is a daunting success all by itself. Twenty years from now, when OC is a considerably more congested urban environment, residents will find the park an invaluable resource and 20 years after that, they will be choosing monuments to erect in honor of those responsible for its creation.

Michael Ray was born and raised in Corona del Mar, currently lives in Laguna Beach and makes a living as a real estate entrepreneur.

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