Orangetree

Orangetree sits inside the City of Irvine's Planning Area 12, which the city records under the name Oakcreek. The published village polygon covers about 331 acres bounded by Irvine Center Drive on the northeast, Sand Canyon Avenue on the southeast, Barranca Parkway on the southwest and Jeffrey Road on the northwest, all of it inside 92618. Most of that ground is not housing. In the city parcel record the four largest uses inside the line are the Irvine Valley College campus at 100.5 acres, a Southern California Edison easement at 58.5 acres, office land at 42.3 acres and public street at 42.2 acres. The homes are counted separately: the city address point layer records 1,259 residential addresses inside the boundary, 1,240 of them on the seven streets named for citrus and orchards, the largest being Apricot with 276 and Orange Blossom with 232. An acreage figure for this village describes a city boundary rather than a subdivision.

The village was not built as one tract and it is not governed as one either. The City's homeowner association layer maps it as master association 12.3, Orange Tree Master Assn. under Seabreeze Management Co., with four recorded sub-associations beneath it covering the patio homes, the condominiums, the terrace units and the villas, each with a different management company: Powerstone for the patio homes, Action Property Management for the condominiums, Nexus Smart Communities for the terrace and Seabreeze for the villas. A second and separate master association, Tarocco Homeowners Assn., holds about 8 acres inside the same village line, so the documents that govern a home depend on which corner of Orangetree it stands in. One public park sits inside the boundary, Oak Creek Community Park at 15616 Valley Oak, 10.35 acres the city classes as a community park, with restrooms, two children's play areas, an open play field, two soccer fields, a baseball field, eight barbecues and eight picnic tables, and the city flags it as a wifi location. The parcel record also carries 23 private park lots totaling about 9.3 acres, which are association recreation ground the city record leaves unnamed. Irvine Unified's own locator, queried at all 39 street centerline segments in the village, returns the same three campuses everywhere: Eastshore Elementary, Lakeside Middle and Woodbridge High.

The name is a receipt for what used to be here. The Valencia orange built Orange County: the first commercial grove went in during 1875, there were more than 20,000 acres of orange groves in the county by 1915 and 64,000 by 1936, when this one county supplied a sixth of all the Valencias eaten in America, with forty-five packing houses running at the peak in the early 1940s. Then the suburbs took it back, and the county was down to fewer than 4,000 acres of Valencia by 1985 and under 100 by 2005. On the Irvine Ranch the shift into citrus had come after James Irvine's son incorporated The Irvine Company in 1894 and moved the operation into field crops, olives and orchards. Orangetree's streets still read like an inventory of the crop: Orange Blossom, Apricot, Lemon Grove, Tangelo, Tangerine, Orchard and Tarocco.

The village itself is late-1970s work and it was never meant to be grand. Orangetree is one of the smallest villages in Irvine and it carries some of the most affordable housing in the city, almost all of it attached: condominiums, townhomes and patio homes rather than detached houses. Orangetree Lake, at 160 Orange Blossom, went up in 1977 and runs to 421 units. The largest thing inside the village boundary is not housing at all. Irvine Valley College broke ground in October 1977 on land at 5500 Irvine Center Drive and opened in 1979 under someone else's name, as Saddleback College North Campus; it became Irvine Valley College on 1 July 1985 and was first accredited as an institution in its own right in July 1988. For its first six years the college the village grew up around was a satellite of another campus rather than a college of its own.