Brightwater

Brightwater covers 71.4 acres measured against the city's published boundary, and 99.5 percent of that ground sits inside the Brightwater Specific Plan area the city maps. The address layer records 409 addresses inside the line, 352 typed residential, on 24 named streets running to 3.16 miles. No address carries a unit designator, and the assessor classes 351 as single-family residential. The homes are among the largest in the city's association register: a median building of 3,433 square feet on a median lot of 5,663, with 137 of them carrying a pool.

The whole boundary falls inside the city's Coastal Zone appeal jurisdiction, in appeal zone 2, which is a consequence of the site rather than an accident of mapping. City zoning reads the ground as undesignated across 98.9 percent of it because the specific plan governs in place of the base zoning, while the general plan designates 73.2 percent residential low density. The streets are named as a set from the New England coast, running Wellfleet, Winthrop, Wareham, Edgartown, Osterville, Oakbluffs and Kennebunk, with Oceanridge Drive carrying the most addresses.

Signal Landmark bought most of Bolsa Chica in the 1960s and proposed a large housing and marina scheme. The state objected, and in 1973 the developer set aside 300 acres to create the Bolsa Chica Ecological Reserve. California bought a further 880 acres from Hearthside Homes, the renamed developer, in 1997, and a 147 million dollar restoration completed in 2006 reopened an inlet to the Pacific for the first time since 1899. What stayed in private hands was the mesa. Underneath it are the archaeological sites known as ORA-83 and ORA-86, an 8,500 year old village with at least 174 human burials in it, which Daniel Rogers of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History called the kind of site that could significantly broaden our understanding of human cultural history, and the arguments over building above them ran for years.

The houses came at the end of all that. Of Brightwater's 352 homes, 94 date to the late 2000s beginning in 2007 and 258 to the 2010s, across about 71 acres. The street names are borrowed wholesale from the New England coast, Wellfleet, Winthrop, Wareham, Edgartown and Osterville, with Oceanridge Drive running along the seaward side, which is as close as a street sign gets to admitting what the view is worth.