Rancho Yorba

Rancho Yorba covers 40.2 acres off Imperial Highway, and all thirty of its named streets are Spanish: eleven Plazas from Plaza de Amantes to Plaza de Vaqueros, ten Vistas from Vista del Amigo to Vista del Valle, five Caminos and four Avenidas, 2.3 miles of street in a 40-acre block. The city records 368 addresses on 330 parcels, every one typed single family, and the median lot is 1,537 square feet, the most compact of any community in this section.

The general plan designates 39.9 of the 40.2 acres Residential Low Medium Hillside at up to six homes to the acre, and 36.9 acres are zoned Multiple-Family Residential at a floor of 2,400 square feet of lot area per unit. One parcel carries a pool. The city's footprint layer measures the buildings at a median 1,404 square feet of ground floor. The boundary lies wholly in ZIP 92807 and in flood zone X, and Rancho Yorba sits in Orange Unified School District.

The streets are a Spanish vocabulary lesson laid out in tarmac. Camino de Naranjas is the road of oranges and Camino de Fresas the road of strawberries, the two crops this ground grew. Avenida de Vinedos is the avenue of vineyards, the industry that founded Anaheim in 1857 and died in 1884 when a disease took every vine in the colony. Then the plazas: de Vaqueros for the cowboys, de Poetas for the poets, de Amantes for lovers, de Indios for the people who were here first.

The community itself sits on the Anaheim Hills side of Imperial Highway, three hundred and sixty eight addresses over forty acres on compact footprints. It was built in 1972, which places it among the very first things put up after Santa Anita Consolidated took the ranch and the Texaco Ventures joint venture began building in August 1971.