Woodbridge

Woodbridge is laid out around a single ring road. Yale Loop closes on itself over 4.9 miles, named in halves as East and West Yale Loop, and two lakes sit inside it: North Lake and South Lake, each with its own beach club and lagoon. The village covers 1,700 acres of Irvine and holds 9,639 residential properties, with a population the village association puts at roughly 30,000.

The association owns and operates 41 recreation facilities: 22 pools, 16 spas, 13 wading pools, 23 tennis courts and 4 pickleball courts, reservable by members only. Four City of Irvine public parks sit inside the boundary as well, the largest Mike Ward Community Park at 21.5 acres. Woodbridge feeds Irvine Unified at every level, from Eastshore, Stone Creek, Meadow Park and Springbrook through Lakeside Middle and South Lake Middle to Woodbridge High, which graduates 94.4% of its students.

The ground under Woodbridge was Irvine Ranch, part of the 93,000 acres James Irvine and three partners assembled from 1864. Serious planning for the village began in 1973 under Irvine Company president Ray Watson, with Doug Gfeller as project manager and Ken Agid on marketing. The name was chosen for the idea of bridging the gap between the villages west of the freeways and the rest of the ranch, and the notion of building a village around a lake crossed by a bridge came back with the planners from a visit to Hilton Head, South Carolina. The Irvine Company began the village in 1975 across roughly 1,700 acres, with the SWA Group doing much of the site planning.

The opening is the part people still repeat. Home sales began with a grand opening in June 1976, and by the company's own account 10,000 would-be homebuyers entered a lottery for the initial 350 homes on the first day. Television crews covered it, one of them from a helicopter, and the first 200 homes were handed out in a few minutes to shrieks from the crowd, after hostesses had spent more than a year taking names on an interest list. Seven builders worked the first phase, and the instant sellout made national news.