Twelve Picket Lane

Twelve Picket Lane covers 16.1 acres and the city's address layer records 188 addresses inside it, all of them sitting on one mapped parcel, which points to attached housing. It is one of eight communities among the fifty on this site to sit on a single parcel. Three streets run inside the boundary: Bluff Cove Drive, Nantucket Lane and Picket Lane. The city zones the whole 16.1 acres Residential Medium Density, where the municipal code allows up to 18 units to the gross acre, and the measured figure works out to twelve addresses to the acre.

Grand Park is 664 feet from the boundary, 7.9 acres kept by the Aliso Viejo Community Association with a tot lot, a drinking fountain, picnic tables, benches, a barbecue and lighting, and Acorn Park at three acres is 1,103 feet. Capistrano Unified's own address locator assigns this ground to Don Juan Avila Elementary for TK through grade 5, then Don Juan Avila Middle and Aliso Niguel High, both Don Juan Avila campuses 0.46 miles from the boundary.

The name is the fence, and the theme holds: the three streets are Picket Lane, Nantucket Lane and Bluff Cove Drive. Nantucket lies about thirty miles south of Cape Cod and was the dominant whaling port of the eighteenth century; the National Park Service calls it the finest surviving architectural and environmental example of a late eighteenth and early nineteenth century New England seaport town. The houses here were built to match, in a Cape Cod style, 188 of them on 16.1 acres in 1999.

That was near the end of Aliso Viejo's building. The county had approved the master plan in 1979, the first homes sold in March 1982 and the first residents arrived that November, and by 1999 the city was almost complete but still unincorporated. It became Orange County's thirty fourth city on 1 July 2001, on a 93.3 percent yes vote, with more than 40,000 people already living here.