Villa Pacific Community

Villa Pacific Community covers 33.3 acres measured against the city's published boundary and holds 291 residential addresses among the 305 the address layer records inside the line. Only one address carries a unit designator and the assessor classes all 291 dwellings as single-family residential. Nineteen named streets serve them across 1.95 miles, and fourteen of the nineteen are circles: Coral Cove, Jamaica, Monte Carlo, Port Royal, Seasprite, Wavecrest, Brookbay, Harbor Point, Sunstar, Barranca, Brookhaven, Green Cove, Bay Crest and Monaco, off the two through routes of Verde Mar Drive and Villa Pacific Drive.

City zoning and the general plan both read the whole boundary as residential medium density, which the built form matches: the assessor's median building is 1,342 square feet on a median lot of 1,597, and 206 of the dated structures are two story against 82 that are single. Twenty-nine of the 291 dwellings carry a pool. The community sits outside the Coastal Zone appeal jurisdiction, no city park land falls inside or within 250 meters of the boundary, and the bus stop layer records four stops within that distance.

Villa Pacific was built across two decades, with 226 of its 291 homes finished in the 1960s from 1965 and another 65 in the 1970s, on about 33 acres. The naming is coastal and Spanish at once, Verde Mar Drive, Villa Pacific Drive, Bluereef Drive, Via Straits Lane, Coral Cove Circle and Jamaica Circle, which was the fashion in a city that was busy selling itself as a beach town while still pumping oil.

Both of those things were true at the same time. The Huntington A-1 well began producing on 24 May 1920 and by October 1921 the field had 59 wells running at roughly 16,500 barrels a day, with more than a billion barrels produced by 2000 and the field still worked today by California Resources Corporation. Meanwhile the beach was building a different reputation. George Freeth's demonstration at the 1914 pier dedication was the first surfing recorded in Huntington Beach, Duke Kahanamoku helped popularize the sport from 1925, and the first surfboard shop opened under the pier in 1956.