Heritage Plaza

Heritage Plaza is four acres on West Central Avenue carrying 162 addresses, 161 of which hold a unit designator, on a single parcel. The zoning is P-C, planned community, and the general plan carries all four acres as High Density Residential. There is no internal street and the community holds no public art of its own.

All four acres fall outside the wildland fuel classification. Heritage Plaza is one of three communities on West Central Avenue, alongside Brea Woods and part of Raintree, and all three are apartment sites on very few parcels. It sits inside Brea Olinda Unified with three campuses close by: Mariposa Elementary is 0.26 miles away with 504 students, Brea Junior High 0.38 miles with 921, and Brea Olinda High 1.16 miles with 1,676.

What sits here now is the product of the city's second remaking. Downtown had been hollowed out by the Brea Mall and the Orange Freeway in the 1970s, and in the 1990s the city relocated a few historic homes, cleared the blocks north of the Imperial and Brea Boulevard crossing and rebuilt from the ground up, opening the new district in 2000. Heritage Plaza is 162 homes packed onto four acres beside it, almost all of them addressed by unit number.

The name is not decoration. The Brea Museum and Historical Society and the Olinda Oil Museum and Trail between them keep close to a century of local record, and the museum's oil well was drilled in 1898, the year of the strike that made the town. The whole four acres of Heritage Plaza fall inside the liquefaction zone the city maps across the valley floor, which is worth asking an inspector about before an offer.