A statue depicts Walt Disney and Mickey Mouse at Disney World’s Magic Kingdom in Florida in June 2023. Two members of a Walt Disney Company product design team sued their employer on Tuesday, alleging that the company pressured them and several others to relocate from Southern California to Orlando to join a new office that was scuttled shortly after they bought new homes.
De La Cruz and Fong allegedly sold their Los Angeles County homes in 2022 and purchased new homes in an Orlando housing market where prices had soared after Disney announced its Lake Nona campus. The companythe campus a year later, citing “considerable changes” to business conditions, as it feuded with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis .
The same month, Disney leadership told employees that completion of the Lake Nona office would be delayed until 2026, according to the lawsuit. By then, 250 employees had already moved to Florida, including Fong and De La Cruz, Lohr said. Others who hadThe Lake Nona campus was never completed. Disney in May 2023 scrapped the project, which was valued at around $1 billion, after a year of acrimony between the company and DeSantis.
Mortgage rates and home prices in the Los Angeles area also had increased between 2022 and 2023, the lawsuit alleges, and it was “impossible” for Fong, De La Cruz and other employees to find housing comparable to the homes they had sold a year earlier.