Quail Ridge

Quail Ridge is 9.4 acres reached from Pine Creek Circle and Quail Ridge Circle, holding 145 addresses on three parcels with about a third of a mile of private street. The city zones all 9.39 mapped acres R-3 Limited Density Multiple Family Residential under a Medium Density Residential general plan designation, and no hazard layer the city publishes touches the boundary.

Gilman Park is at 2590 Hartford Avenue, 13.7 acres, open since 1978, with parking and restrooms. Rolling Hills Elementary is 1.07 miles out at 554 students, Acacia Elementary 1.55 miles at 661, Beechwood Elementary 1.83 miles at 872 in grades K through 8, and Troy High 1.56 miles at 2,504. Mail goes to ZIP 92835 and the boundary sits in council district 3.

Quail Ridge sits on the lip of what used to be a flood basin. The Tongva hunted and gathered across this part of the county for something like fifteen thousand years. Oil was found in the Brea area in the late 1800s, and through the early 1900s the ground just east of here was wells and tanks standing among grazing cattle and horses. After a bad Orange County flood in the 1930s the Army Corps of Engineers built the Fullerton Dam, finished in 1941, to keep the water off the towns downstream, and the basin behind it became land nobody was going to be allowed to build on.

The condominiums went up in 1976, two years behind the first phase of Ted Craig Regional Park, 144 low rise units on Quail Ridge Circle and Pine Creek Circle with pools, a spa and water running through the site. Buyers here have always been buying the park as much as the unit. The lake, the lawns and the creek bottom on the other side of the fence only stayed open because the Corps needed somewhere to put the water, and that is a better guarantee of a view than any zoning line.