St. Augustine II

St. Augustine II covers 15.6 acres measured against the city's published boundary and sits entirely inside the Holly-Seacliff Specific Plan area. The address layer records 89 addresses inside the line and types 70 as residential, all classed single-family by the assessor with no unit designators. Five named streets serve them across 0.57 miles and four of the five end in the same syllable: Cedarwood, Tanglewood, Foxwood and Spicewood, off Brentwood Drive.

The assessor's median building is 2,604 square feet with a tenth to ninetieth percentile band of 1,783 to 2,771, on a median lot of 5,120 square feet, and six of the 70 dwellings carry a pool. City zoning reads the whole boundary as specific plan designation and the general plan designates 77.1 percent of it residential low density. The community sits outside the Coastal Zone appeal jurisdiction. No city park land falls inside the boundary or within 250 meters, and the bus stop layer records no stop within that distance either.

The second St. Augustine phase went up immediately after the first, with 52 of its 70 homes finished in 1999 and the remaining 18 in 2000, across about 16 acres. Where the first phase reached for golf names, this one is all trees. Cedarwood, Tanglewood, Foxwood, Spicewood and Brentwood make up the whole plan, and not one of them names anything that grew here naturally.

What did grow here was celery, and a great deal of it. From the 1890s through about 1910 this coastal plain was one of the country's top producers, thanks to cool salty sea breezes, artesian wells and rich peat soil. David E. Smeltzer established the crop commercially in Orange County in 1891 and a small town named Smeltzer grew up around his packing houses near what are now Gothard Street and Edinger Avenue. A blight from around 1905 to 1908 took the profit out of celery and farmers turned to sugar beets and winter cabbage.