Mayor Austin Lumbard has called this a chance to "re-write" the future of Tustin Legacy since the city's first open house back in May. That framing held up fine until a Voice of OC column ran this month with the actual cost estimates pulled from a city report. The range reads less like an invitation to dream and more like a bill: $22.6 million just to stop debris from falling out of the South Hangar's ceiling, up to $271 million for anything resembling the public gathering space residents have been sketching at meetings all summer.
That figure didn't exist in public conversation until a few days ago. It changes what the city's annual Local Reuse Authority meeting on August 18 is actually for, and it's worth understanding before anyone treats that meeting as the place where Tustin decides the hangar's fate.
What's Still Standing, and Why
The North Hangar burned for nearly a month starting November 7, 2023, releasing asbestos and arsenic into the air over central Orange County before crews finally extinguished it. By October 2025, KTLA reported that cleanup of the hazardous debris was complete, closing out roughly two years of emergency response on the 85-acre parcel the Navy still technically owns.
The South Hangar survived. It sits on about 7 acres, carries a listing on the National Register of Historic Places, and comes with a problem the city has been unusually candid about: the structure needs life-safety repairs right now, including the risk of debris falling from its own ceiling. The city doesn't own the building outright either. Tustin holds it under a long-term lease from the U.S. Navy, which means any major decision about its future runs through federal timelines as much as local ones.
The Number Nobody Said Out Loud
Here's what the city's report actually lays out, according to Voice of OC's reporting on the document:
| Scenario | Estimated Cost |
|---|---|
| Life-safety repairs only, stopping the falling-debris risk | $22.6 million |
| Partial stabilization with limited public access | $203 million |
| Full adaptive reuse, including event space and commercial use | $271 million |
City staff were instructed to prepare an offering document meant to give prospective developers "information regarding the South Hangar's historic significance, long-term operational costs, current structural and utility limitations and unique ownership considerations to facilitate an informed evaluation of the Site and gauge market interest," per the city's own language quoted in the column.
That's the polite version of shopping the building around to see who can afford it.
Why Moffett Field Is the Only Real Comparison
The closest precedent sits about 370 miles north, at Moffett Field near Mountain View. Google Planetary Ventures signed a 60-year lease on NASA's Hangar One there and committed roughly $200 million to the project. Hangar One was built in 1931 out of steel. Tustin's hangars are wood, built a decade later for a different kind of aircraft entirely, which matters for anyone comparing structural costs.
The Voice of OC columnist, who has consulted on hangar redevelopment before, guessed that maybe three or four organizations within driving distance of Tustin Legacy have the financial capacity to do something comparable. That's not a criticism of the outreach process. It's a description of how narrow the field of realistic partners actually is once the number is public.
Meanwhile, the rest of Tustin Legacy's remaining acreage is moving through entirely ordinary development channels. The Irvine Company has committed to just over 1,300 apartment units elsewhere in the district, with a quarter set aside for lower-income households. Confluent Development is building roughly 170 active-adult units with a commercial memory-care component operated by Clearwater. None of that required a $200 million reuse partner or a Navy sign-off, because none of it involves a wood aircraft hangar sitting on federally leased land. The hangar is stuck in a different category of project entirely, and that's the part the community meetings haven't always made explicit.
What August 18 Actually Is, and Isn't
Last year's version of this meeting, held August 19, 2025, drew more than 110 residents to a presentation by base-closure expert George Schlossberg, a screening of a short film titled "The Heart of Tustin's Legacy: History, Honor and Opportunities within the Navy's Hangars," and a walk-through of five stations staffed by project partners. It was informational. Nobody voted on anything, because there was nothing on the table to vote on yet.
This year's meeting on August 18 is the same annual format, tied to the city's role as Local Reuse Authority overseeing the former Marine Corps Air Station. As of this writing, the city's Tustin Legacy page still lists it with "more information to come," which tracks with how the city has handled these updates in past years: broad strokes now, specifics closer to the date.
What's realistic to expect on August 18:
- An update on the offering document process and whether any developers have expressed interest since it went out
- A status report on the framework plans for the 500 acres still undeveloped across the district
- Likely no binding decision about the South Hangar's fate, since the city has said a second community meeting is planned for this fall and the City Council makes the final call regardless
If you want to weigh in directly, the city has kept the same channels open all year: email [email protected] or call the dedicated hotline at 714-788-5859. The first open house of this cycle happened May 13 at The Annex at Tustin Legacy, 15445 Lansdowne Road, the same address likely to host future sessions.
The Cost of Doing Nothing
There's a version of this story where residents wait for a perfect answer before the city commits to anything. Lumbard has already ruled that out. In comments to LAist in November 2024, he noted that the structure is so large that routine maintenance costs the city millions of dollars a year just to keep it standing, whether or not anyone ever decides what it becomes. His exact words: there's real sentimental and military history value in the hangar, "but I think we need to look at this through clear eyes and also protect the financial health of the city."
That's the piece of the story easy to miss in a headline about community input. Inaction isn't free. Every year the South Hangar sits undecided is a year of security costs and deferred maintenance layered on top of whatever the eventual repair bill turns out to be. Removing the hangar entirely, if that's the direction the city eventually takes, would itself require a 2 to 3 year process involving the Navy and preservation agencies, according to the city's own FAQ page. There's no version of this where the clock stops.
Why This Matters If You Live Here
None of this changes what's already true about daily life around Tustin Legacy: the Old Town farmers market still runs every Wednesday morning, the district's parks keep expanding, and the 4,200-plus homes already built there aren't waiting on a hangar decision to function as neighborhoods. What's changed is the framing. For most of this year, the city's outreach has asked residents what they'd like the hangar to become. The report that surfaced this month answers a more useful question first: what can anyone actually afford to make it become, and who's in a position to write that check.
August 18 is a good date to mark if you've been following this story, less because it will resolve anything and more because it's the clearest public checkpoint on how the offering process is going. The real decision point is still ahead, and it will hinge less on what residents say they want and more on whether one of those three or four capable partners the columnist mentioned actually shows up.
If you're weighing what any of this means for property near Tustin Legacy, whether you're already living there or watching the district from the outside, the team at Arbor Real Estate follows these local development stories closely and can talk through what they mean in practical terms. Let's Connect.
