Mission Ridge

Mission Ridge covers 35.5 acres and records 69 addresses on 69 parcels at a median lot of 0.298 acres, the largest of any community here laid out one home to a lot and well clear of the next. Nine streets run 0.93 miles inside the boundary, among them Amapola, Bodega, Colina, El Ciervo, Escondido, Goleta, La Morada and Payaso. The general plan carries 30.5 acres at up to 3.5 homes an acre, the city's lowest residential density, with 4.8 acres as recreation and open space.

The whole boundary lies in flood zone X. Capistrano Unified serves it, and the district's address locator returns Viejo Elementary at 447 students, Fred Newhart Middle at 1,105 and Capistrano Valley High at 1,991 from every interior point tested.

Mission Ridge is a 63-unit condominium association, one of the smaller and older HOAs in Mission Viejo, created around 1969, just a few years after the first homes went on sale in 1965 and the first families moved into Deane Homes in 1966. The name points at the planning trick that made the whole master-planned community possible: put the roads down in the valleys and put the houses up on the ridgelines and hilltops, the approach Donald Bren worked out for terrain that developers had once considered too hilly and geologically awkward to build on.

Getting a small hillside community built and occupied that early put Mission Ridge among the first wave of Mission Viejo Company neighborhoods, going up while the company was still under its founding O'Neill family partnership, before Philip Morris bought a major interest in January 1970 and took full ownership by September 1972. The rest of the master plan, the lake, the mall, and the roads that would later host Olympic cycling all came after Mission Ridge's ridgetop homes were already occupied.