Upper Peters Canyon

Upper Peters Canyon holds 1,431 addresses on 169 acres, more than eight to the acre, on 2.41 miles of public street. Five hundred and seventy of those addresses carry a unit designator, so a large share of what stands here is attached housing, and the median parcel measures 0.082 acres. All 156 zoned acres are Planned Community, and the general plan mixes four residential densities with 13 acres of general commercial and 10 acres of public facilities.

Three city facilities sit inside the boundary. Santiago Hills Park covers 9.3 acres at 8040 East White Oak Ridge and the city records it as active use, and Fire Station 7 and a police substation share an address at 8501 East Fort Road. Nearly 8 acres of the boundary are designated open space park in the general plan, and Irvine Regional Park lies 1,263 feet away with the 620 acre Loma Ridge Nature Preserve 2,944 feet beyond it. Every parcel here is assigned to Chapman Hills Elementary, Santiago Charter Middle and El Modena High.

In Spanish this was Canon de las Ranas, the canyon of the frogs, named for the marsh it drained into at what is now Upper Newport Bay. It takes its present name from James Peters, who from about 1891 dry farmed barley and beans in the upper canyon, built a house and planted a eucalyptus grove near the bottom of it. The land was part of Rancho Lomas de Santiago and later of the Irvine Ranch, and water was the whole point of it: the Irvine Company finished the upper reservoir in 1931 and the lower one in 1940 to hold and distribute runoff off the watershed.

The houses came from 1984, when Orange adopted a plan for this ground and annexed it, and building ran through to the late 1990s. The plans that built it were filed under the name Santiago Hills, which is why the neighborhood's own name and the city's name for it have never matched. The streets were named as a forest and a game list: Aspen, Star Pine, Live Oak, White Oak Ridge, Ironwood, Dogwood, Bayberry and Candleberry, then Fox Run, Elk Glen, Deerfield, Fawnwood, Deerwood, Teal and Peacock, with Mine Canyon and Sugar Loaf Peak for the hills behind.