Brea Hills

Brea Hills is a small, high community of 30 acres holding just 40 addresses on three streets: North Brea Hills Avenue carries 23 of them, East Bobwhite Road 13 and East Hillside Road four. The city's parcel layer counts 51 parcels inside the boundary, 46 of them residential, on lots running to a median of 0.221 acres, and the structures run to a median of 3,775 square feet with four bedrooms. The city's tree inventory records 39 street trees along its 0.38 miles of road.

The zoning here is ORSP, the Olinda Ranch Specific Plan, and the general plan splits the 29.8 mapped acres into 13 acres of Natural Open Space, 11.8 acres of Low Density Residential and 5 acres of parks and recreation, so less than half of it is lots. All 31.5 classified acres fall in the Very High fire hazard severity class and the landslide layer covers 4.3. Measured to the nearest elementary campus, only Hollydale and Olinda Village sit further from a school than Brea Hills does: Olinda Elementary is 1.24 miles away, Brea Olinda High 2.5 miles and Brea Junior High 3.53 miles.

Brea Hills is one of the small hillside groups that went up when the oil companies released this ground. Forty homes were built here in 2002 and 2003, the typical one about 3,775 square feet on a fifth of an acre, on three streets at the top of the slope above Olinda Ranch. It is one of the newest pieces of the city and one of the highest.

Bob White Road carries the local street theme up the hill. The bobwhite is a quail, and the neighborhood below runs on bird names from Blue Jay and Cardinal to Skylark and Woodpecker, which is what a developer does when the ground he is building on is a wildlife corridor as much as an old oil lease.