Harbor Valley Condominiums

Harbor Valley Condominiums holds 208 separately assessed homes on 8.66 acres, laid out on fourteen streets, several of them named for flowers. Gloxinia carries 28 of the addresses, Tulip 20, and Verbena and Lilac follow, alongside Robson, Silvertip, Godwin, Logan, Rocky, Sterling, Bogart, Saddle, Adams and Stockdale. The assessor records three bedrooms on 81 homes, four on 62, two on 51 and one on 13, with a median building area of 1,269 square feet on a median lot of 1,500 square feet.

The general plan designates the whole site Medium Density Residential, which allows up to 15 homes to the acre, and FEMA places all of it in Zone X as an area with reduced flood risk due to levee. Garden Grove Unified files this land in study area 99 of its own school locator, which feeds Newhope Elementary, Stephen R. Fitz Intermediate and Los Amigos High.

The flower streets are the tell. Gloxinia, Lilac, Tulip and Verbena run through 208 homes on nearly nine acres at Adams Avenue, alongside Bogart, Godwin, Logan, Robson, Saddle, Silvertip, Sterling and Stockdale. Building here started in 1964 and continued to 1970, which makes this among the oldest housing in the city, laid down while much of Fountain Valley was still in beets.

In 1964 the city was seven years old. Talbert had voted to incorporate in 1957 with 189 registered voters on its rolls, and 91 of the 160 who turned out said yes. The first mayor was James Kanno, a Nisei engineer whose family had been taken from their asparagus farm here to the Poston camp in Arizona and whose father was held separately at Lordsburg in New Mexico. Their farm was leased to a neighbor and returned to them in 1945. Kanno topped the poll in 1957 and became one of the first Japanese American mayors on the mainland.