Canyon View

Canyon View is a small hillside community, 85 addresses on 47 acres laid out as a planned unit development on either side of Canyon View Avenue between Chapman Avenue and Newport Boulevard. The recorded tract map dedicated Canyon View Avenue, Windy Pointe, Hidden Canyon, Pinnacle Pointe, Terrace Ridge and Canyon Ridge to the public for street purposes and created no private street and no gate, though the city's own road centerline layer carries none of them. The houses were planned at roughly 2,400 to 3,000 square feet on lots of about 5,000 to 10,200 square feet, and the median recorded parcel measures 0.139 acres against zoning of single family on 20,000.

The subdivision set aside two open space parcels of about 24.6 and 10.9 acres, and the general plan designates 8.5 of the 47 acres open space, so a large share of the boundary was never building ground. No city park, trail or public building falls inside it, and none of the address points carries a unit designator, so what stands here is detached housing throughout. The city's parcel record splits elementary between Panorama Elementary, with 69 parcels, and Chapman Hills Elementary, with 23, then assigns every parcel to Santiago Charter Middle and El Modena High.

This slope was farmed until the very end of the 1970s, the last of the ground east of Orange that had been part of Rancho Santiago de Santa Ana and then of the citrus and grazing country running up the El Modena grade. It was still agricultural land when the city rezoned it for houses in December 1978, and two separate attempts at a subdivision were approved and then lapsed before anything was built, partly because the East Orange plan adopted in 1975 had sharply limited what could go up here.

The scheme that finally stuck came before the Planning Commission in April 1987: 85 houses on about 54 acres with two pieces kept as open space. The condition attached to it was a road. The developer had to push Canyon View Avenue through from Chapman Avenue to Newport Boulevard as a secondary arterial, and neighbors in Rocking Horse Ridge fought it, arguing it would shift truck traffic onto their side of the hill. The road went through, the houses followed in 1988, and the avenue gave the neighborhood its name.