Anaheim Hills Estates

Anaheim Hills Estates covers 37.1 acres off Serrano Avenue, and every street inside it carries the name of an American college: Georgetown, Grinnell, Lehigh, Loyola, Purdue, Rutgers, Swarthmore, Vassar and Williams, reached from Serrano. The city records 129 addresses on 114 parcels, all of them detached single family, and the median lot runs 8,214 square feet under a Single-Family Residential district with a 5,000 square foot floor. The general plan designates the whole boundary Residential Low, at up to 6.5 homes to the acre.

Fifty-seven of the 114 parcels carry a pool on the assessor record, so half the lots here have one. The city's footprint layer measures the houses at a median 2,459 square feet of ground floor area, and reads 89 of them as two-story against 18 single-story and four at three. The boundary lies wholly in ZIP 92807 and in flood zone X. Anaheim Hills Estates sits in Orange Unified School District, feeding Canyon High and the district's Anaheim Hills elementary campuses.

Anaheim Hills Estates belongs to the first wave of building in these hills. Westridge, the opening neighborhood, went on sale in July 1972 and all 325 of its homes were gone by early 1975, and the Estates followed immediately behind it. The association was created in 1976 and holds 112 single family homes, and the houses inside the boundary date from 1970 through 1978 with the bulk of them finished around 1976. Lots run to a little over eight thousand square feet, and half the homes have a pool, which tells you what a hillside house in Anaheim was expected to include in the middle of that decade.

The street naming is the giveaway. Georgetown, Grinnell, Lehigh, Loyola, Purdue, Rutgers, Swarthmore, Vassar and Williams are all American colleges, and someone laying out these blocks in the early 1970s chose a whole roll call of them, with Serrano Avenue running past as the one Spanish name and the road that still connects the neighborhood to the rest of the hills. The developers kept the sycamore, oak and eucalyptus groves where they could, and close to a thousand acres of the wider project went to public agencies as open space, which is why a tract this dense still has canyon at the end of it.