OCVibe Hopes to Become Anaheim’s New Downtown

When Anaheim mayor Ashleigh Aitken took the stage at a recent groundbreaking celebration for OCVibe, the message was clear: the upcoming shopping, dining, and entertainment district will be a de facto downtown for the Orange County city.

Being built near to the city’s hockey arena, the Honda Center, by the Anaheim Ducks owners Henry and Susan Samueli, OCVibe aims to give Anaheim residents and guests a centralized location to hang out, have fun, and spend some money, whether the NHL is in season or not. You know how the streets around Wrigley Field in Chicago and Fenway in Boston are full of bars, restaurants and nightclubs, turning those ballparks from simply places to watch a game to the centers of full-blown nightlife districts? OCVibe is Anaheim’s attempt to recreate that atmosphere in a location that didn’t grow up like a traditional city—it’s a sprawling community that’s part suburb, part theme park. It’s similar to what the Atlanta Braves and Cobb County have done around that team’s stadium outside Atlanta with The Battery; give the people a reason to come to the arena or ballpark even if they don’t have tickets, and hopefully they’ll keep doing it year-round.

Anaheim clearly doesn’t want for fun. Beyond the Disneyland Resort area, the city has a number of entertainment and shopping areas. Instead of a downtown, though, it feels like what it is: a series of strip malls. There are some great food halls, like the Anaheim Packing District, but when it comes to a full day out—doing some shopping, getting a bite to eat, catching a game or show—there’s no one place people can go to with a large number of options. The closest is probably Downtown Disney, and although Anaheim clearly depends on Disney to a huge degree, the city understandably would like to have alternatives. 

Enter OCVibe. The recent groundbreaking ceremony at the Anaheim transit building doubled as a sort of preview of what the district will offer. A new location of the popular high end regional chain A Restaurant is coming to OCVibe, so there was a station serving small bites from their menu. Other booths let us taste items from other restaurants coming to the development, and an Anaheim Ducks pop-up shop was selling merch for the new season, with the Ducks mascot Wild Wing mingling and posing for photos like the king of the party. A music room also gave a taste of the types of nightclubs guests can expect, with pumping dance and electro music and the best signature cocktails of the whole event.

“Around Honda Center, there really wasn’t a lot for a concert goer to come early and stay late for,” Tracee Larocca, the Chief Marketing Officer for OC Sports and Entertainment, told me. “And so [with OCVibe] we wanted to create a place for them to do that, to create a sense of, oh, we can go grab a drink or a bite before the game for a concert, or go somewhere after a concert. One of the interesting parts about a lot of Orange County is we close up early, and so, you know, there wasn’t really a vibrant nightlife scene. And [the Samueli’s] vision is really creating a place that’s like a beacon for all of the very diverse communities of Orange County.”

OCVibe will be opening in waves over the next several years, with the first arriving in 2026. That’ll include the Market Hall, a spot for shopping, dining, and taking in a show, with various stores and restaurants and a 5,700-seat concert venue. Additional music venues will follow over the rest of the 2020s, along with two hotels and housing units. According to the OCVibe’s planners, it’ll be the “largest investment in affordable housing in Anaheim,” with almost 400 apartments potentially being part of the development.

The most impressive thing about OCVibe is that no public money is being used. The Samuelis are the primary investors, and although the city is clearly cooperating closely with them, Anaheim and Orange County aren’t funding it. As an Atlanta resident, I can’t help but compare OCVibe to The Battery, and the whole Truist Park construction project which received over half a billion dollars in taxpayer money from a county that tried to ram the whole thing through with as little public debate as possible. The Battery is nice, but it’s hard to eat there or catch a Braves game without remembering the deplorable way the project was approved. OCVibe seems to have cut all that controversy off at the pass by relying entirely on private financing, the way privately-owned commercial projects like this should be funded.

If current plans hold out throughout the years-long construction project, OCVibe could be a significant boon to the city of Anaheim without depleting any of its public funds. Between that and the massive Disneyland Forward project that was approved earlier this year, the Anaheim of 2034 should look a lot different than today’s city.

Senior editor Garrett Martin writes about music, videogames, TV, travel, theme parks, wrestling, and more. He’s on Twitter @grmartin.