Mariposa Townhomes

Mariposa Townhomes holds 188 addresses on 8.53 acres, with 187 of them separately assessed, laid out across ten streets. Bird Court carries 39 of the addresses, Peters Court 29 and Osborne Court 24, followed by Lewis, Hampton, Scanlan, Sanmian, Trower, Danwill and Foster. The assessor records three bedrooms on 162 of the homes and two on 23, with a median building area of 1,690 square feet on a median lot of 1,796 square feet.

The city's landscape survey maps two swimming pools inside the boundary, and the general plan designates the site Low Medium Density Residential, which allows up to 10.8 homes to the acre. 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 the address range to Gisler Elementary and Talbert Middle, and the site sits inside the Fountain Valley High boundary.

Mariposa is the Spanish for butterfly, and it is one of the prettiest names in a city whose streets mostly carry surnames. Here the surnames are the streets themselves: Danwill, Foster, Hampton, Lewis, Osborne, Peters, Scanlan and Trower run through 188 homes on eight and a half acres, most of them three bedrooms, with two pools. Building ran from 1985 to 1989.

The surnames on Fountain Valley's older map belong to people who farmed here. Roch Courreges arrived alone from a Basque landowning family at sixteen in 1867, tried the gold country, and settled instead on eighty acres called The Bluffs, running sheep from 1878 and marrying Magdalena Mogart in 1880. Robert Gisler was born in Altdorf, Switzerland in 1861, landed at Ventura at seventeen and bought his ground here in October 1903, raising nine children who all went through the old Fountain Valley grammar school.