Anaheim Hills Trader Joe's and Festival Apartments Update
August 27, 2026
August 27, 2026
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.
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.
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 the project. 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.
| Anaheim Hills Village | Anaheim Hills Festival | |
|---|---|---|
| Address | 6336 E. Santa Ana Canyon Road | 8020 E. Santa Ana Canyon Road |
| What was there | Big Lots | Regal Edwards theater, closed since 2022 |
| What's coming | Trader Joe's, first Anaheim Hills location | 447-unit apartment complex, approved March 2026 |
| Status | Listed "coming soon," no opening date set | Approved 4-3; construction timeline not yet announced |
It would be easy to file these as unrelated local news items and move on. But both plazas are changing spaces that had been vacant, just in different ways.
At Anaheim Hills Village, the former Big Lots space is set to become a Trader Joe's, the kind of grocer that creates its own errand instead of waiting for foot traffic to find it. At Anaheim Hills Festival, the approved plan replaces the closed theater with apartments alongside the retail that already exists.
One plaza is adding a grocery store. The other is adding apartments. Neither project required tearing down what already worked, and Target and Nordstrom Rack aren't going anywhere. That is the part worth noticing if you live nearby: these two centers are changing in two completely different ways in the same twelve months.
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 list includes both newer names and longtime favorites locals are actually filling on a Tuesday night, not just weekend novelty spots.
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 store and a 447-unit apartment project matter beyond their own parking lots.
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.
Two shopping centers on the same road are changing at the same time, and neither project required tearing down what already worked. At Anaheim Hills Village, the former Big Lots space is set to become a grocery store; at Anaheim Hills Festival, the closed theater is set to become apartments. 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 opening and a 447-unit apartment project approved 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.
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