Crystal Springs Apartments

Crystal Springs Apartments covers 12.98 acres at Warner Avenue and San Mateo Street, and the city's address layer records 318 homes there, the third largest count of the 28 Fountain Valley communities on this site. San Mateo Street carries 109 of the addresses, La Hacienda Avenue 80 and Warner Avenue 65, with the remainder on San Bruno Street and La Alameda Avenue. The county assesses the property as two land parcels, of 8.52 and 4.43 acres.

The city's general plan designates the whole boundary High Density Residential, which allows 15 to 30 homes to the acre, and FEMA places all of it in Zone X as an area with reduced flood risk due to levee. Fountain Valley School District's school locator assigns this address range to Cox Elementary and Masuda Middle, and the property sits inside the Fountain Valley High boundary that Huntington Beach Union High School District publishes.

Everything about the naming here points four hundred miles north. The complex is Crystal Springs, its lanes are San Mateo and San Bruno, and Crystal Springs is the pair of reservoirs that sits in the San Andreas rift valley in San Mateo County, west of the towns of San Mateo and Hillsborough, holding the water San Francisco drinks. The other two streets, La Alameda and La Hacienda, are the Spanish for the tree lined walk and the ranch house. The buildings date to 1972 and there are 318 homes on about thirteen acres off Warner Avenue.

What made the flat safe to build on was concrete. The Santa Ana River flooded catastrophically in 1938, drowning parts of Anaheim and Orange under several feet of water and killing close to sixty people, and the Army Corps answered with Prado Dam in 1941 and a channel that runs through Fountain Valley to the sea. Housing followed in the 1960s and 1970s, and this was one of the larger results.