Irvine’s shopping centers offer a quality found nowhere else in California.

Visitors stroll through landscapes that resemble resorts, including open-air paseos under date palms and olive trees. Shoppers can catch a live music performance or a free exercise class, or maybe even go for a ride on Irvine Spectrum Center’s carousel or Giant Wheel. And then there’s the food: a choice of more than 30 delicious international cuisines.

Irvine Spectrum Center is our largest retail center, with more than 200 shops and restaurants attracting roughly 17 million visitors a year — on par with Disneyland. But every Irvine resident lives close — often a short walk — to their retail needs. 

That’s all thanks to Irvine’s Master Plan that placed shopping and dining near homes.  

With all of these centers, we’re committed to maintaining a high standard of quality, just as the Master Plan called for decades ago. In recent years, we’ve invested about $350 million in more than a dozen retail centers throughout the city. That includes a $200 million project at Spectrum Center in 2018, which replaced a big-box store with 30 new fashion boutiques, cafes and restaurants. We spent an additional $30 million to create a lakefront plaza with space for small, independent restaurants at the Woodbridge Village Center. And local centers benefit from the continual reinvestment afforded by our long-term care and ownership.

In the meantime, we are working every day to sustain the overall excellence of our city’s public areas, as industry experts have recognized.

“In other communities, stores wear out, signage gets old, colors fade and parking lots fall apart,” says longtime retail analyst Greg Stoffel, of Stoffel & Associates. “You don’t see that in Irvine.”