Red Hook Capital Partners and OCASA Convert 62,000 SQFT Former KDOC-TV Headquarters into $30MM Charter School Campus in Santa Ana

The adaptive reuse project transforms a five-story office building once home to Orange County’s first commercial television station into a TK-6 STEAM-focused school that could serve up to 900 students.

The former KDOC-TV headquarters at 1820 E. First Street in Santa Ana is being gutted and rebuilt as the third campus for the Orange County Academy of Sciences and Arts, a tuition-free public charter school specializing in STEAM education. El Segundo-based Red Hook Capital Partners LLC acquired the five-story, 62,000-square-foot office building last September for $11.3 million — roughly $182 per square foot — and is now overseeing a complete renovation that will bring the total project cost past $30 million, according to OCASA founder and executive director Kapil Mathur, who spoke with the Orange County Business Journal.

The school plans to open for the 2026-27 academic year, with the first day of classes set for August 18. Santa Ana has approved the site, which falls within the boundaries of the Tustin Unified School District, to serve up to 900 students in transitional kindergarten through sixth grade.

Red Hook Capital Partners, a firm founded by Craig Underwood and David Hyun that specializes in designing, acquiring and renovating locations for charter school operators, is financing the project and will lease the completed facility back to OCASA. According to Mathur, the partnership model is essential for the nonprofit-run school, which lacks the capital to fund large-scale real estate acquisitions on its own. The Orange County Business Journal reported in September 2025 that the property, known as Midtown Plaza, was previously owned by La Cañada Flintridge-based investor Zhizhao Sun, who had paid $13.2 million — or approximately $213 per square foot — for the building, according to CoStar data.

A Complete Overhaul

The renovation involves converting the building’s former office interiors into classrooms, science laboratories, a large auditorium, a library, a cafeteria that will provide free breakfast and lunch, outdoor recreational space, and changing rooms for physical education. In a nod to the building’s broadcast history, OCASA intends to preserve the KDOC-TV broadcast center, which students will use to produce a student-run news program called Rocket News.

KDOC-TV operated out of the Santa Ana building for nearly four decades after signing on in 1982 as what is described as Orange County’s first commercial television station. The station was originally owned by Golden Orange Broadcasting before being acquired in 2006 for $149.5 million by Bert Ellis and Henry and Susan Samueli. In 2022, it was sold to Radiant Life Ministries Inc. for $41 million.

Enrollment Growth and Federal Funding

The new Santa Ana campus will be OCASA’s third location, joining an existing elementary school in Laguna Niguel and a middle school in Aliso Viejo. Founded in 2015 by Mathur and a group of parents, the school saw a 20 percent enrollment increase this academic year to 400 students. The expansion is supported in part by a $6 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education awarded in 2024, when OCASA was one of 16 organizations selected nationally to replicate successful charter programs. The school has also become a portfolio school of Oakland-based nonprofit Silicon Schools Fund, which is providing additional funding and technical assistance.

According to a charter school brief published by S&P Global, approximately 728,000 students — or 11 percent of enrolled California TK-12 students — attended one of the state’s 1,278 charter schools during the 2024-25 school year. The brief found that charter enrollment growth has been positive for seven of the past eight years, increasing by 18 percent over that period.

Office-to-School Conversions Gain Momentum in Santa Ana

The OCASA project is part of a broader pattern of educational institutions snapping up vacant or underperforming office buildings in Orange County, a region where office vacancies remain elevated in the post-pandemic era. According to Kidder Mathews’ Q1 2025 Orange County Office Report, the county’s office vacancy rate stood at 11.8 percent, while Colliers reported an 18 percent availability rate for the same period, noting that no new office deliveries had added to supply in two years. A Q4 2025 analysis from firsttuesday Journal observed that office vacancies in Orange County are approaching 15 percent and predicted that repurposing vacant office buildings for other uses — including residential conversions — will be part of the long-term solution.

Just last month, the city of Santa Ana approved a separate adaptive reuse project: Cristo Rey Orange County High School’s $21 million acquisition of a 151,000-square-foot, four-building campus at SOCO Harbor office park on Harbor Boulevard. The Catholic school, founded in 2023, put down an $8 million deposit with the help of donor pledges and plans to move in by August. The trend is not new in Santa Ana — Orange County School of the Arts has occupied repurposed commercial buildings in the city’s downtown since 2000, including a former seven-story bank tower and a converted Bank of America branch used for performing arts and culinary training.

Mathur told the Orange County Business Journal that Santa Ana is experiencing a residential development boom, and that having a school in the center of that growth will be valuable for incoming families. As the office market continues to recalibrate and schools face growing enrollment demand, the conversion of underutilized commercial space into educational facilities is emerging as a practical, community-serving model for adaptive reuse across Southern California.