The Heights at West Covina
2330 South Azusa Boulevard
West Covina, California

Project Description

The Heights at West Covina is a shining example to the creativity and persistence of the Eclipse Development Group team. The land, which had been vacant and in front of a municipal landfill for decades, was nothing more than a vast expanse of hills, valleys and topographical nightmares. Over 4 million cubic yards of dirt had to be moved to create a viable building pad for the 375,000 square foot center anchored by Home Depot, Target, PetsMart, Staples, El Pollo Loco, Wendy’s Starbucks, Fresh & Easy, Southern California’s first Ruby Tuesday Restaurant, Wells Fargo Bank and many others.

Special Circumstances

The Heights at West Covina is a very interesting development because of the special circumstances that surround the history of the neighboring landfill site owned and operated by BKK. There is a well known history of fighting and law suits between the City and BKK and the subject property sat fallow for decades because of the inability of the two parties to come to any meaningful arrangement to work together. The original EIR for the property contemplated a multi-tier office park, hotel, gold course and sports complex. The City had worked toward the completion of the business park with a number of developers and it could just never get off the ground. Because of a long standing relationship with the Director of Economic Development, the site was presented to us with a request for “help, what can we do with this site?” Because the subject property sat within 1,000 feet of a residential/ commercial landfill there are stringent guidelines in place for construction of vapor barriers and passive gas detection systems within each of the buildings. The proximity to the landfill also required substantial environmental testing and careful planning for storm runoff and site detention prior to entering the County storm system. The topographical complexity of the site also added another wrinkle to the development. At the end of the day, we moved more than 3.5 million cubic yards of dirt and had to blast several thousand tons of rock to reach our eventual grade for the development.

Original Permitted Land Use(s) and outcome of entitlement process

When Eclipse Development Group became involved in the project it was entitled for commercial office, light manufacturing and light industrial uses. The EIR was completed for that use, so it did have to be updated and modified for the retail commercial use that it was ultimately approved for. Because the City had worked so long with other potential developers, to no avail, to create a business park, it was evident that zoning and entitlements would not be the most challenging aspect of this property. The original EIR was very comprehensive and only required an amendment and approval timing were really needed to change over the permitted land use issues.