North Costa Mesa/Mesa Del Mar/Halecrest Hall of Fame

This is where Costa Mesa's remaining open land is. The General Plan records the city as 99 percent built out in 2015 and puts its two largest available properties here: the 31 acre Segerstrom Home Ranch site and the 33 acre Sakioka Lot 2 site, both still in agricultural production at that date and both north of Interstate 405. The North Costa Mesa Specific Plan governs that ground and measures 798 acres on the city's published polygon, the largest plan area in Costa Mesa, and the Harbor Gateway District, a 323 acre industrial and business park, sits northeast of Interstate 405 and the Santa Ana River.

Halecrest Park covers 4.5 acres at 3124 College Avenue and Del Mesa Park covers 2 acres, both carrying names the city uses for parts of this neighborhood. Across the city Costa Mesa publishes 41 named park and open space polygons, the largest Fairview Park at 219 acres and the largest developed neighborhood park TeWinkle Memorial at 43 acres. Newport-Mesa Unified School District runs every public campus in Costa Mesa, 20 of them on the 2024-25 federal count with 9,235 students between them, and the assigned campus follows the address.

Halecrest came first among the houses. Herman Hale built it in the mid 1950s and originally called it College Estates, and he gave the streets Irish names that appear nowhere else in Costa Mesa: Killybrooke, Donnybrook, Belfast, Donegal, Galway, Dublin and Shamrock. Killybrooke Elementary sits inside it and the Halecrest Park Swim and Tennis Club is on Killybrooke Lane. The Hall of Fame homes went up next door in 1963 and carried the same idea further, onto Kerry, Londonderry, Killarney, Limerick, Cork and Bray.

Mesa del Mar took the opposite theme. Roughly 850 single story ranch houses went up between 1960 and 1965, and the streets were named for the men who mapped the New World and the places they were looking for: Portola, Junipero, Coronado, Cortez, De Soto, Magellan, Drake, Mendoza, Velasco, Presidio, El Camino and Cibola, the golden city the Spanish never found. Halecrest Park and Del Mesa Park serve the two neighborhoods, and the Harbor Gateway business district, 323 acres of it northeast toward the Santa Ana River, is what most of the north end became instead of houses.