Coyote Hills Bluffs

Coyote Hills Bluffs is 11.7 acres on a single street, Coventry Circle, off Gilbert Street on the western hills. The city zones all of it R-3R Restricted Multiple Residential, the designation Fullerton uses to hold multiple-family housing to a single story, and the general plan carries the whole boundary as Greenbelt Concept. Inside are 152 addresses on four parcels, with a quarter mile of private street.

Every one of those 11.7 acres sits in the state's Very High fire hazard severity class, the highest the city publishes. West Coyote Hills Park is at 2100 North Gilbert Street on 3.64 acres, open since 1979, with picnic tables. Sunset Lane Elementary is 0.66 miles out at 700 students, D. Russell Parks Junior High 0.93 miles at 854 and Sunny Hills High 1.24 miles at 2,337. Mail goes to ZIP 92833.

The cliffs that drivers on Rosecrans Avenue see rising to the north are the reason this address is called the Bluffs. They are the cut face of the West Coyote Hills, a ridge that runs across the western end of Fullerton and spills into La Habra, Buena Park and La Mirada, and for most of the twentieth century the ridge was an oil field rather than a view. Crews terraced the steep canyon walls and laced them with asphalt roads so rigs could reach the slopes, and later earth moving work flattened enough of the hills to push Gilbert Street through and open the ground on either side of it to houses.

The 152 condominiums on Coventry Circle went up in 1980, near the end of that building wave, and they are one of five small associations that share the Coyote Hills name on this side of town. The whole plan is a single loop street with the slope standing behind it. West Coyote Hills Park sits at the Gilbert Street end, and the trails that climb from there lead straight into the open land the city and Chevron have been arguing over since the 2000s.