Anaheim Hills Trader Joe's and Festival Apartments Update

Drive east on Santa Ana Canyon Road this month and you will pass two shopping centers doing almost nothing that they were doing a year ago. At Anaheim Hills Village, crews are working inside the old Big Lots box to open the neighborhood's first Trader Joe's. About a mile further down the same road, the Anaheim Hills Festival center just cleared its last major hurdle to replace a movie theater that has sat dark since 2022 with 447 apartments. Neither project has anything to do with the other on paper. Read them side by side and they start to look like two answers to the same question: what does this stretch of Anaheim Hills do with the empty space it already has.

The Big Lots Box Is Finally Getting Its Trader Joe's

Trader Joe's confirmed earlier this summer that its Store 295 is coming to 6336 E. Santa Ana Canyon Road, inside the Anaheim Hills Village center, in the space Big Lots vacated. It will be the chain's first location in Anaheim Hills, a detail worth sitting with if you have been driving to the Orange or Yorba Linda stores for years because nothing closer existed.

As of this writing, Trader Joe's has not announced an opening date. The location is listed as "coming soon" on the company's site, and the company has said only that its crew is working to get the doors open. That vagueness is normal for Trader Joe's, which is in the middle of a national growth run, adding roughly 20 new stores across the country in 2026 after opening 43 locations in 2025. Anaheim Hills is one stop on a list, not a special case, which is part of why nobody local has a firm date to give you yet.

What the company will tell you is how it wants to be seen once it opens. Trader Joe's describes itself simply: "we see ourselves as your neighborhood grocery store." For a community built around a couple of shopping plazas rather than a walkable downtown, that framing matters more here than it would somewhere with five grocers within a mile.

A Mile Down the Canyon, the Movie Theater Isn't Coming Back

The other project sits at the opposite end of the spectrum. The Regal Edwards Anaheim Hills theater at the Anaheim Hills Festival center, 8020 E. Santa Ana Canyon Road, closed in 2022 and has stayed closed since. In early March 2026, the Anaheim City Council voted 4-3 to approve a four-story, 447-unit apartment project on that footprint, after the proposal had been continued three separate times since it first came before the council in December.

More than 40 residents spoke at the final hearing, with roughly 30 opposed and about 10 in favor. Much of the opposition centered on adding density to an area with wildfire exposure, and the city's fire chief addressed those concerns directly during the meeting. The council approved it anyway. The plan calls for the apartments to wrap around a five-level parking structure, with a clubhouse, pools, courtyards, a fitness center, and a dog park and bluff park that will be open to the public, not just residents of the new building.

The rest of the 57,560-square-foot Festival center stays put. Target, Nordstrom Rack, Petco, and 24 Hour Fitness remain exactly where they are. Only the empty theater changes.

Same Road, Same Problem, Two Different Fixes

It would be easy to file these as unrelated local news items and move on. But both plazas were solving for the same shortage, just from opposite directions.

Anaheim Hills Village had a box nobody wanted to shop in. The fix was to bring in a retailer people will drive out of their way for, the kind of grocer that creates its own errand instead of waiting for foot traffic to find it. Anaheim Hills Festival had the opposite problem: a dead anchor in a plaza that still has healthy tenants, but not enough people living close enough to keep all of it humming on its own. The fix there wasn't a better store. It was more residents, put directly on top of the retail that already exists.

One plaza needed a stronger draw. The other needed a bigger built-in customer base. Neither project required tearing down what already worked, Target and Nordstrom Rack aren't going anywhere, and neither one solves a problem by simply adding more of the same thing that was already there. That is the part worth noticing if you live nearby and have watched both corners sit half-used for a few years: the city and a national grocery chain independently concluded the same thing about this stretch of the canyon, and they're fixing it in two completely different ways in the same twelve months.

The Restaurant List Keeps Growing Too

None of this is happening in a vacuum. Anaheim Hills has quietly added to its dining options over the past couple of years, and the newer names are the ones locals are actually filling on a Tuesday night, not just weekend novelty spots.

• Story, an Asian fusion restaurant that built a following fast enough to become one of the neighborhood's most-booked tables
• Reunion Kitchen + Drink, at 5775 E. Santa Ana Canyon Road, a tavern-meets-craft-kitchen spot known for its burger and cocktail list
• Rosine's Mediterranean Cafe, family-run since 1995, still turning out the rotisserie chicken regulars come back for
• Craft by Smoke and Fire, built around a whiskey room stocked with hundreds of bottles
• Bosscat, Culinary Dropout, and Medii Kitchen, three newer additions that have each built their own regular following

None of these are inside Anaheim Hills Village or the Festival center, but they sit within a few minutes of both, which is part of why a new grocery anchor and 447 new residents matter beyond their own parking lots.

Thursday Nights Still Belong to Ronald Reagan Park

If retail and housing are the slower-moving story, the summer calendar hasn't changed much, and that consistency is its own kind of local knowledge. This July, Anaheim ran its free Concerts in the Park series on Thursday evenings at four parks across the city, including Ronald Reagan Park in Anaheim Hills, with shows running 6:30 to 8:00 p.m. and food trucks parked nearby. It's family-friendly, it's free, and it's been the default Thursday plan for people who live within walking distance for years, the kind of recurring summer fixture that will almost certainly be back next year even though this season's run has wrapped.

Ronald Reagan Park does double duty. It's also the trailhead for the Anaheim Hills Trail route out to Weir Canyon Regional Park, a 7.1-mile moderate loop with about 1,200 feet of elevation gain that takes most hikers three and a half to four hours round trip. Trail status across the wider Anaheim Hills network is currently listed clear across all 14 monitored trails, and if you want something shorter, the Oak Canyon Nature Center a few minutes away covers 58 acres with a year-round stream and four miles of trail that stay shaded most of the route.

None of that changes because a grocery store is opening or an apartment building got approved. It's the part of Anaheim Hills that was never actually a problem to begin with.

What This Means If You Already Live Here

Two shopping centers on the same road are being reworked at the same time, for opposite reasons, and neither one required tearing down what already worked. That is not a coincidence so much as two different institutions, a grocery chain and a city council, arriving at the same read on this part of the canyon within months of each other. If you've watched the Big Lots box sit empty or driven past a dark movie theater marquee for the past few years, this is the year both of those spaces stop being empty, just not in the same way.

If you're weighing what any of this means for your own home, whether it's time to sell, refinance, or just understand what your property is worth with a Trader Joe's and hundreds of new neighbors arriving nearby, that's exactly the kind of question worth a real conversation. Mary Meza Hayes has spent 18 years working this stretch of northern Orange County and can walk you through what local changes like these actually mean for your situation. Schedule your free consultation whenever you're ready to talk specifics.