Drive the length of Santa Ana Canyon Road on a Thursday evening in July and you can watch the two ends of Anaheim Hills swap roles. The Festival Center at 8020, once anchored by a movie theater and a Friday-night parking lot, is being planned as housing. The Village at 6336, which lost its Big Lots, is about to gain the first Trader Joe's in the community. In between, Ronald Reagan Park fills up with lawn chairs before the tribute band starts. If you already live here, you have probably noticed pieces of this. The thesis of this post is that they are not separate stories. The retail spine that defined Anaheim Hills for two decades is being rebuilt around a smaller, more residential, more evening-oriented center of gravity, and this summer is the first one where you can see all three moves happening at once.
The Big Lots space is becoming a Trader Joe's
The former Big Lots at Anaheim Hills Village is being taken over by Trader Joe's Store 295, listed on the chain's site as "coming soon" and reported as the company's first location inside the Anaheim Hills community. The address is 6336 E. Santa Ana Canyon Road. No opening date has been announced, but the store page is live.
Two things about that are worth pausing on. First, Anaheim Hills residents have been driving the 91 to the Yorba Linda store or crossing into Orange for years. A Trader Joe's inside the community changes the weeknight grocery trip from a fifteen-minute round trip into a five-minute one, which is the kind of small friction that tends to reroute where people stop for gas, coffee, and takeout afterward. Second, the space had been dark long enough that its reuse felt uncertain. Filling it with a grocer, rather than another discount box or a fitness tenant, keeps the Village oriented around daily errands.
Reporting on the store came from WhatNow in late June 2026, which noted the space had previously been Big Lots and that the chain has been expanding elsewhere in Orange County at the same time, including a second Costa Mesa location and a larger footprint at its Orange store.
The movie theater at Festival is being planned as 447 homes
Two miles east, the shuttered movie theater at Anaheim Hills Festival Center is the site of a much larger change. Shea Properties Management has filed to amend the city's General Plan and the Festival Specific Plan in order to build a multiple-family apartment building on the former theater parcel at 8020 E. Santa Ana Canyon Road. Coverage of the filing in April 2026 put the unit count at 447.
That is not a small infill. For context, the Festival Center's retail lineup that most residents grew up with, Macaroni Grill and BJ's and Wood Ranch and Target and TJ Maxx anchored around the theater, was built as a suburban entertainment destination. Replacing the theater with hundreds of apartments reframes the center as a place people live at, not only a place people drive to. Whether that is good or bad depends on which part of the parking lot you use most, but the practical effect is that the two biggest retail nodes on Santa Ana Canyon Road are moving in opposite directions this year: the Village is doubling down on daily-needs retail, and Festival is quietly adding rooftops.
The application materials are on the city's Anaheim Hills Festival Center project page at anaheim.net. If you want to read the actual scope, that is where the plan documents live.
Thursday nights have moved to Ronald Reagan Park
While those two centers are in transition, the community's summer social calendar has consolidated at Ronald Reagan Park, 945 S. Weir Canyon Road. The city's 2026 Concerts in the Park series runs seven Thursdays across June and July, with the last four all at Reagan Park in Anaheim Hills. Shows run 6:30 to 8:00 p.m. Admission is free. Gourmet food trucks are on site, so you can skip the pre-show dinner scramble.
The July lineup:
| Date | Act | Style |
|---|---|---|
| Thursday, July 9 | That's What I Like | Bruno Mars tribute |
| Thursday, July 16 | Tijuana Dogs | Classic rock |
| Thursday, July 23 | Young Guns | Country |
| Thursday, July 30 | Dance Dance Evolution | Dance hits, disco to now |
If you have not been in a couple of years, a few things have shifted. The food-truck rotation has gotten better, the crowd skews family-first until about 7:30, and parking around Weir Canyon fills earlier than it used to. Locals who bring a blanket at 5:45 usually get the grass they want. Locals who show up at 6:35 park at Canyon High and walk.
Where to eat before or after
The restaurant list around Santa Ana Canyon Road is more interesting than its reputation suggests. Recent OpenTable and Yelp rankings for Anaheim Hills, updated through June 2026, put a mix of long-timers and newer arrivals at the top. A few worth knowing if you are pairing dinner with a Thursday concert or a Saturday errand run:
- Story Anaheim for a sit-down date-night dinner. Asian-influenced menu, small dining room, holds up under review scrutiny and is still the community's most-booked romantic table.
- Reunion Kitchen + Drink for the pre-concert crowd. American, easy for families, and quick enough to make a 6:30 curtain at Reagan Park.
- Food House if you want the ramen the neighborhood keeps talking about. It sits inside Tokyo Central, which is worth knowing because the parking is the shopping-center kind, not the strip-mall kind.
- The Wild Artichoke for something more intimate, tucked into a small commercial strip and still one of the highest-rated kitchens in the zip code.
- Wood Ranch at Festival for tri-tip and the group of eight your kid's soccer team is going to insist on.
- Rosine's Mediterranean for the reliable Wednesday-night dinner that has been the default here for years.
None of these places are new. What is new is that Trader Joe's opening at the Village puts a real anchor at the west end of the corridor, which changes which of these restaurants feel convenient to which errands. Story is closer to the Village. Wood Ranch, BJ's, and Culinary Dropout are Festival. Medii Kitchen and Rosine's fall in between.
The pattern most residents haven't put together
Here is the piece worth holding onto. The three changes are usually reported as separate stories: a grocery announcement, a planning application, a summer concert flyer. Taken together, they describe a corridor that is quietly turning inside out.
For two decades, Santa Ana Canyon Road was structured around destination retail. You drove to the theater at Festival, you drove to the box stores at the Village, and the parks in between were places you took kids on weekends. That model has been eroding for a while. The theater at Festival is gone. Big Lots at the Village is gone. What is filling the vacancies is smaller, more residential, and more oriented toward evenings and daily errands. Apartments at Festival. A grocer at the Village. A concert series at Reagan Park that has grown from a quiet civic program into the closest thing Anaheim Hills has to a downtown on a Thursday night.
If you own a home along this corridor, the practical effect is that the walking radius of your house is about to matter more than it did five years ago. Homes near Reagan Park are closer to the summer center of gravity than they used to be. Homes near Festival will trade some retail convenience for more foot traffic and more neighbors. Homes near the Village get their first genuinely useful grocer inside the community.
None of that shows up on a portal search. It shows up in what you can actually do on a Wednesday at 6 p.m., which is the version of Anaheim Hills that will decide how the next few years feel to live here.
If you are curious what your home is worth in that changing corridor
If you have been in your home along Santa Ana Canyon Road for a while and you are wondering how these shifts change what your property could sell for, that is a conversation worth having early rather than late. Ryan Salloum works this corridor closely and can put together a free home valuation grounded in what is actually trading in Anaheim Hills right now, not what a national estimator thinks it should be.
