Camden Purchases Site of Former Amusement Park

Camden Properties Trust, one of the nation’s largest apartment developers and operators, said Monday that it has purchased the site of the former Pike amusement park in Long Beach and plans to build hundreds of housing units on the property.

The 9.5-acre site, which has been mostly vacant for years, is the last major parcel to be developed in the downtown Long Beach redevelopment zone. The property on Ocean Boulevard near Pine Avenue sits west of the Long Beach Convention Center and north of another major project, a $150-million entertainment and shopping complex being developed by San Diego-based DDR Oliver McMillan.

Houston-based Camden Properties said the first phase of its Long Beach project will consist of about 400 apartments that are scheduled to be completed in 2002. Camden did not reveal a sales price for the parcel or the identity of the seller.

Long Beach officials said the seller was AEW, a Boston-based investment firm that has owned the property for several years. AEW bought the property from a partnership headed by Los Angeles developer Wayne Ratkovich, who had proposed building more than 1,200 apartments and condominiums, a hotel and about 1 million square feet of office space. But the $1-billion project died after the region fell into recession in the early ‘90s.

Camden will seek to expand the residential portion of the development and needs city and state approval to do so, said Susan Shick, director of the city’s community development agency. Shick said the agency is supportive of a project with a mix of high-rise, mid-rise and low-rise apartments.

“We think that would be very appropriate [for the area]” Shick said.