DisneylandForward and the Resort District: What Anaheim Approved

Anaheim's Resort District, the roughly 1.5-square-mile area surrounding Disneyland Resort, is entering its next chapter under DisneylandForward, the development plan the Anaheim City Council approved in 2024. The plan does not approve a specific ride or land. Instead, it updates the zoning rules that govern where theme park, hotel and entertainment uses can be placed across Disney's existing properties, giving the company flexibility to mix uses on land it already owns.

For decades, the resort's specific plan divided Disney property into strict districts, with theme park uses in one area and hotels and parking in others. DisneylandForward loosens those internal boundaries, so a future attraction could be built on a current parking lot area and a hotel could rise nearer the parks, provided projects meet the city's development standards, height limits and review processes. Individual projects still face their own approvals and environmental review as they are proposed.

City discussions around the plan focused on what Anaheim gains alongside any expansion: street and sidewalk improvements around the resort, infrastructure upgrades and the tax base that resort visitors generate for city services. The Resort District's hotel and sales taxes are central to Anaheim's budget, funding a large share of the general fund that pays for police, fire and neighborhood services across the city, a link officials cite whenever resort development is debated.

For residents, the practical effects arrive gradually. Construction, when projects are announced, will be measured in years, and the streets most affected are the resort corridors of Harbor Boulevard and Katella Avenue, already among the city's most managed traffic zones. Neighbors in adjacent residential areas watch for changes in traffic patterns, lighting and noise, topics the city's conditions of approval are designed to address project by project.

Whatever gets built first, DisneylandForward has already settled one question: Anaheim's future and the resort's future remain formally intertwined, with growth directed inward to existing resort land rather than outward into neighborhoods. For a city that reorganized itself around Walt Disney's park in 1955, the approval is best understood as a renewal of that original bargain, written this time with mixed uses, public improvements and several decades in mind.