COSTA MESA — Eric Nelson never forgot the shock he felt upon moving to the Westside in the mid-1990s.
The Irvine native had grown up in a well-off suburb, and when he rented his first apartment after high school, he had to deal for the first time with vagrants, fenced lawns and trash dumped on the pavement.
Now, Nelson, the vice president of entitlements for the Red Mountain Retail Group, has returned to the intersection where he used to live — but not as a resident.
His Santa Ana-based firm specializes in taking decrepit properties and turning them around, and one of its latest plans is to develop a shopping and residential complex on the corner that Nelson once looked at through his dingy apartment window.
“I don’t think anyone could say it was a property that the community could see the benefit of,” Nelson said about the fenced-off property at the corner of Hamilton and Charle streets. “It was definitely a blighted piece of property. Our plan is to take it and turn it into something that’s of benefit and doesn’t detract from the visual appeal or the commercial appeal of the neighborhood.”
The 84,000-square-foot property, which Red Mountain purchased last year from a private owner, features an abandoned house and a closed medical building, garage and auto repair shop.
Nelson and his team plan to convert the back of the parcel into 14 condominiums and fill the front end with retail outlets.
So far, Red Mountain hasn’t reached a deal with any retailer — preliminary talks with Walgreens pharmacy hit a snag — but within a year or two, Nelson hopes to see the complex rife with activity.
He’s also interested in obtaining a pair of neighboring properties, one occupied by a garage and the other by a City Council-sanctioned vegetable garden. Some residents have complained about the possibility of losing the latter property, but Nelson said he plans to go ahead with development even if the garden stays off-limits.
The area around Hamilton Street has already changed in many ways since Nelson lived there. In the mid-1990s, the Save Our Youth center had just launched to keep local teens out of gangs, and Rea Elementary School had yet to reopen its doors. The neighborhood remains one of the city’s poorest spots, but Nelson points to its developments as positive change.
