Upper Bay

Upper Bay is the northernmost residential ground in Newport Beach: Santa Ana Heights, which the city describes as roughly bounded by Upper Newport Bay to the south, Santa Ana Avenue to the west, Bristol Street to the north and the Bayview Terrace area to the east, together with the gated Bayview enclaves at its eastern edge. There is no master association. The city maps four separate community associations here, Bayview Terrace at 146 residential units and Bayview Court at 88, both gated, Newport Upper Bay Estates at 57 and not gated, and the gated Newport Palisades Community Association, for which the city publishes no unit count. The Santa Ana Heights streets themselves carry no mapped association at all.

The zoning is what sets Santa Ana Heights apart from every other Newport Beach neighborhood. Its specific plan carries a Residential Equestrian district, SP-7 (REQ), whose stated intent is a single family neighborhood with limited equestrian uses where a rural character with an equestrian theme shall predominate, and the code sets horse counts by lot size. The neighborhood's southern edge is open water and protected land: 752 acres of ecological reserve under the Department of Fish and Wildlife and roughly 135 acres of nature preserve under OC Parks, with up to 35,000 birds using the bay at once during winter migration. A 10.5-mile bike loop circles the water from Jamboree at San Diego Creek, designated horse trails run between 23rd Street and Jamboree Road, and Back Bay Drive below the community is one-way north for motor vehicles. Bayview Park, two acres at Mesa Drive and Bay View Avenue, is the neighborhood's city park.

The head of Upper Newport Bay came within one court case of being a marina. In 1963 the fourteen year old son of Frank and Frances Robinson found a private property sign at North Star Beach and the family started asking why. What they found was a land exchange between the Irvine Company and Orange County that would have turned the upper bay into a boat harbor ringed with houses, the same treatment the lower bay had already had. They founded Friends of Newport Bay in 1967, spent a decade in court, and in 1973 the exchange was ruled unconstitutional. California bought most of the upper bay and the Upper Newport Bay Ecological Reserve was dedicated on 11 April 1975. Fran died in 2001 and Frank two years later, and they are generally counted as the parents of the conservation movement in Orange County.

The land side of this area is Santa Ana Heights, which spent most of its life as unincorporated county under the departure path of John Wayne Airport. That is why it looks different from the rest of Newport Beach: modest one story ranch houses from the 1950s and 1960s on deep lots, with stables at the back. Newport Beach took it in two stages, the land east of Irvine Avenue in January 2002 and the land west of it on the first day of 2008, and the new zip code changed what the ground was worth almost overnight.