Eastridge Villas

Eastridge Villas covers 31.8 acres off Serrano Avenue, on six streets over eight tenths of a mile: Armstrong, Colter, Columbus, Livingston and Road Runner, reached from Serrano. Four of those five carry the name of an explorer, continuing the theme through the whole Eastridge grid. The city records 104 addresses on 93 parcels, every one detached single family, and the median lot is 9,600 square feet, a third larger than in Eastridge Estates next door, under the same 7,200 square foot minimum.

Fifty-three of the 93 parcels carry a pool on the assessor record. The city's footprint layer measures the houses at a median 2,583 square feet of ground floor and reads 70 of them as two-story against 18 single-story. The general plan designates the whole boundary Residential Low, and it lies wholly in ZIP 92807 and in flood zone X. Eastridge Villas sits in Orange Unified School District and feeds Canyon High.

Eastridge Villas keeps going with the explorers its neighbor started. Columbus and Livingstone are the famous ones. Colter is John Colter, the Lewis and Clark man who walked back into the Rockies alone and came out with the first account of the Yellowstone geysers. Armstrong is the one who went furthest. Serrano is the odd one out and belongs to the ground rather than the theme, a Californio family name that runs all through this end of the county, and Road Runner is simply the bird that still crosses these roads.

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. The houses in Eastridge Villas went up almost entirely between 1975 and 1977, with 1976 the median year, on lots that run around a quarter acre. Fifty three of the hundred and four homes have a pool. The whole neighborhood reads as one piece because it was built as one, in the years when the Anaheim Hills Planned Community Association was holding builders to a single architectural standard across the hills.