Irvine Company: Shotguns vs. Railroad Crews and a $1 UC Irvine Land Deal

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The Irvine Company's 120,000-acre holdings trace to the drought of 1864, which killed the cattle of ranchero Jose Antonio Sepulveda and forced the sale of Rancho San Joaquin. Gold Rush merchant James Irvine I bought it with Benjamin and Thomas Flint and Llewellyn Bixby, then added the hilly Rancho Lomas de Santiago from William Wolfskill in 1866 for sheep grazing, creating a 185-square-mile ranch. Irvine refused to subdivide while neighbors sold lots. When Collis Huntington's Southern Pacific crews began laying track across the ranch, Irvine's men rode out with shotguns, and Irvine later granted the route to the Santa Fe on his own terms. After his death in 1886, trustees tried to auction the ranch; James Irvine II, at 25, had the sale declared illegal and incorporated the Irvine Company in 1894.

In 1961 the company sold 990 acres to the University of California for one dollar, and architect William Pereira planned a city around the new UC Irvine campus; the city of Irvine incorporated in 1971. The Tax Reform Act of 1969 capped foundation ownership of a business at 20 percent, forcing the James Irvine Foundation to sell its 54 percent stake. A. Alfred Taubman's consortium bought the company in 1977, and minority investor Donald Bren bought out partners for more than $500 million in 1983 and became sole owner in 1996. The company expanded to the MetLife Building in New York and 71 South Wacker in Chicago, but laid off 1,700 hotel and resort staff in 2020 and in September 2024 sold San Diego's Symphony Towers for $45.7 million after buying it for $134 million in 2003.

• More than 50,000 Boy Scouts camped at the 1953 national jamboree on the site of today's Fashion Island, and Jamboree Road was built for it.
• The one-dollar university sale brought faculty, students and state-funded water, power and roads to the surrounding company land.
• Of about 93,000 core acres in Orange County, roughly 44,000 were kept for development and over half preserved as open space.
• In 2014 the company returned 2,500 acres already approved for housing to preservation.
• The sources cite Bren's net worth at about $15.3 billion as of 2021 and more than $220 million in gifts to local schools and universities.