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.
Disney asked employees Maria De La Cruz and George Fong in 2021 to relocate to Lake Nona, a planned community in Orlando, and courted them with the promise of affordable housing, strong schools and a new office with extensive amenities, according to the lawsuit filed in Los Angeles County Superior Court. Those who didn’t relocate would lose their jobs, managers allegedly told the team.
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 company canceled the campus a year later, citing “considerable changes” to business conditions, as it feuded with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R).
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Fong, De La Cruz and around 250 other employees who already had relocated to Florida felt pressured by Disney to return to California, where most of their team members remained, according to the lawsuit. Fong and De La Cruz allegedly incurred significant losses when they sold their Orlando homes and relocated once more.
“Disney upended 250 families for no reason whatsoever, without fully compensating these individuals for the significant losses relating to the unnecessary move,” Jason Lohr, an attorney for Fong and De La Cruz, said in a statement to The Washington Post.
Disney did not respond to a request for comment Thursday.
Disney told employees about plans for the Lake Nona office in 2021, according to the lawsuit. Managers allegedly said most employees in the company’s parks and resorts division based in Southern California — roughly 2,000 people — would need to relocate to Orlando to better collaborate with their Florida counterparts. The new office would open by 2023, employees were allegedly told.
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Managers “made it clear” that those who declined to move would lose their jobs, the lawsuit alleges. Lohr said a “significant number” of employees resigned.
Fong sold the Los Angeles home he had inherited from family members and moved to Orlando in 2022, according to the lawsuit. De La Cruz also sold her home, the lawsuit says, and both bought new homes in Orlando that June.
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 had agreed to the relocation were still urged to move to Orlando by 2024, according to the lawsuit.
The 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. Disney had sued the governor weeks earlier, accusing him and the state legislature of retaliating after Disney executives criticized Florida legislation banning discussion of LGBTQ issues in public schools. A DeSantis spokeswoman said the lawsuit was an attempt to “undermine the will of the Florida voters” and circumvent state law.
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Fong and De La Cruz allege that they and other employees who moved to Florida feared for their jobs after the Lake Nona project was scuttled. Disney allegedly told them they could remain or return to California, but De La Cruz and Fong feared they would be laid off if they did not rejoin the majority of their teams still on the West Coast.
Fong and De La Cruz allegedly struggled to sell their Orlando homes and move back to California. Disney’s plans for an Orlando office had spurred a rash of residential development there, which increased housing inventory and vacancy rates as the Disney employees looked to resell their homes, the Wall Street Journal reported last year.
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.
Lohr said the exact losses that Fong and De La Cruz incurred were hard to measure but were “substantial.” Fong and De La Cruz still work for Disney, Lohr said.
“We truly regret the disruption you’ve all faced due to this initiative,” a Disney representative told Fong and De La Cruz in an email, according to the lawsuit.
