Camino Grande Villas

Camino Grande Villas covers 33.7 acres off Nohl Ranch Road, and its streets are named for the overland transport era: Butterfield, Iron Horse, Overland and Stage Coach, alongside Anaheim Hills Road, Ladera, Langtree and Montefino. The city records 108 addresses on 99 parcels, all detached single family, with a median lot of 3,200 square feet, and only half a mile of public street runs inside the boundary. Zoning is Multiple-Family Residential at a floor of 3,000 square feet of lot area per unit, the district Anaheim applies to compact detached housing.

The general plan divides the boundary almost evenly, 17.1 acres Residential Low Medium Hillside and 16.4 acres Open Space, so half the ground here is slope held undeveloped between the homes. Eight of the 99 parcels carry a pool on the assessor record. The whole boundary lies in ZIP 92807 and in flood zone X, the minimal hazard class. Camino Grande Villas sits in Orange Unified School District and feeds Canyon High along with the district's Anaheim Hills elementary campuses.

The streets in Camino Grande Villas are all ways of crossing a continent before there were roads. Butterfield is the Butterfield Overland Mail, which from September 1858 to March 1861 ran stagecoaches 2,700 miles from Missouri and Tennessee to San Francisco on a southern loop chosen because it never snowed, with about a hundred stages and a hundred and seventy five stations along it. Stage Coach and Overland say the same thing plainly, and Iron Horse is what put the stage lines out of business.

Anaheim Hills itself began on 30 October 1970, when Santa Anita Consolidated took deed to 4,200 acres of the Nohl Ranch to build a planned community, and a Texaco Ventures joint venture took over the residential land in August 1971. The first neighborhood, Westridge, opened in July 1972. The city bought a separate 300 acres for a tournament class golf course, which Richard Bigler laid out and which opened in 1972. Camino Grande Villas is a run of attached homes on Camino Grande, the big road, with lots of about three thousand square feet and eight pools shared between a hundred and eight addresses. Ladera means slope and Montefino a fine hill, so the Spanish names describe the ground while the English ones remember how people used to get across it.