The Renaissance Plan and subsequent industrial moratorium serves as “a reminder that nice-sounding and well-intentioned ‘justice’ legislation can lead to far-reaching injustices,” writes one columnist.
As the second-largest city in Orange County and the 14th largest across the whole state, Santa Ana has historically enjoyed a diverse business ecosystem sustaining around 13,000 businesses spanning retail, service, manufacturing, and more. Recent developments, however, threaten to endanger the economic engine that sustains Santa Ana, warn business leaders.
Being incorporated in 1886, Santa Ana is among Orange County’s oldest cities. As such, it stands in stark contrast to newer, master-planned cities like Irvine and instead features more mixed zoning and an overlap of residential, commercial, and industrial use. Largely influenced by Jerry Brown era “environmental justice” legislation and an effort to build more affordable housing, the City Council is now seemingly looking to edge out certain businesses in favor of high-density, multi-unit sky rises.
It began in 2007, when city officials put forth a “Renaissance to revitalize the downtown area and create a transit-oriented district with high-rises, condos, and apartments. The plan immediately attracted scrutiny from business owners and residents alike. Their argument was that it would effectively enforce gentrification, usurp property rights, and gut good-paying industrial jobs.
The City did—and continues to—argue that the plan was a compromise to allow existing “non-conforming” businesses to stay open. And while that has technically been correct—businesses have been allowed to continue operating—the Plan unilaterally rescinded the ability of business owners to sell their property to substitutes and analogous firms. That penalizes employers for decades of investment in the City and holds hundreds of jobs for Santa Ana residents in jeopardy.
Last year, the Santa Ana City Council doubled down and adopted Urgency Ordinance No. NS-3064 to extend a moratorium on the “approval, commencement, establishment, relocation or expansion of industrial uses located within the Transit Zoning Code,” with plans to eventually rezone the area permanently.
That last point is critical. While Santa Ana had previously assured industrial businesses they could remain indefinitely under an overlay zone compromise, it now appears the City is reneging on that promise by moving to rezone the area without proper compensation. Some legal experts argue this is a flagrant property rights violation.
In his reporting for Reason, columnist Steven Greenhut cites a letter penned by an attorney for Adams Iron Co. sent last August. The letter accuses the city of “holding up permit approvals even though the ordinance ‘does not authorize the city to put on hold permits for existing industrial uses.’” The attorney states that Santa Ana is adopting a “‘draconian position’ that extinguishes the company’s vested rights—in violation of constitutional prohibitions on ‘taking’ or ‘damaging’ of private property without payment of just compensation.’”
The ordinance was set to expire on April 15, 2025, unless made permanent by the City Council. For the record, a permanent ordinance seems to be the likely outcome. In advance of that decision, the Planning Commission reviewed a list of recommended clarifications last week and once again opened up public discussion about the controversial ordinance.
“Why is it that those businesses are not being addressed versus attacking all of the businesses in this area? This constitutes unlawful seizure [of] property,” commented business owner Christy Taylor during the February 24, 2025 meeting. “And where is the compensation for our losses?”
“What makes this even worse is the lack of clarity on whether the City of Santa Ana intends to provide relocation assistance or compensate businesses like mine for the revenue we will lose due to these changes,” writes Mayra Ruiz, owner of Knight Towing. “Are we expected to absorb these devastating financial losses on our own?”
To the latter, city officials responded with a generic and arguably uncaring answer about how “the ordinance does not force relocation” and, therefore, “relocation assistance is not anticipated to be needed.”
That response misses the mark. The larger problem is that the business community feels largely undercut and outright threatened by the City Council’s continuous refusal to listen. The environmental laws used to justify the City Council’s actions, like 2017’s SB-1000, were meant only to prevent excessive new industrial encroachment—not punish established businesses critical to the local economy. And while affordable housing is indeed a major concern for Orange County, the businesses Santa Ana appears to be subverting are the same ones that currently provide hundreds of jobs and generate a significant tax revenue.
And if city officials wanted to beat allegations that this constituted a land grab—albeit a slow and untraditional one—they haven’t done a great job.
“The city is finally meeting with the owners, but it needs to come up with a plan that respects these businesses’ property rights,” writes Greenhut. “In the urbanist world that city planners envision, there’s no reason residents and businesses can’t coexist. This is also a reminder that nice-sounding and well-intentioned ‘justice’ legislation can lead to far-reaching injustices once local officials gain new powers.”
