Emerald Ridge

238 addresses sit inside the 29.5 acres the city draws for Emerald Ridge on its HOA Local register. They sit on ten streets, Plushstone, Ametrine Way, Tanzanite and Feldspar Way among them, carrying 0.04 miles of centerline. The county parcel record inside the boundary is 245 parcels, predominantly detached single family houses. The median lot the county records here is 0.09 acres and 48 feet wide. The city general plan gives 22.3 of those acres a low density residential designation. The zoning layer puts 22.2 acres in the RLM-4000-D zone and 7.0 in OS. Mail here carries the 92688 zip code and a Rancho Santa Margarita postal city.

29.5 acres are rated Very High on the 2025 state fire hazard severity map the city publishes. The city assigns the ground to evacuation zone RSM07, which it describes as SFR, HOA Park and Pools. Water comes from the Santa Margarita Water District and trash is collected Wednesday by CR&R. All of it lies in Saddleback Valley Unified, which feeds Melinda Heights Elementary, Rancho Santa Margarita Intermediate and Trabuco Hills High.

Emerald Ridge is one of the last neighborhoods built on the plain before the city existed. Its homes date to 1998, twelve years after the first Rancho Santa Margarita homes were sold in 1986 and a year before residents voted to incorporate. The land was part of the O'Neill family's holding, bought with James Flood in 1882 and kept in Orange County when the ranch was divided in 1940 and the southern half sold in 1942 for Camp Pendleton.

Whoever named the streets took the emerald in the title literally and kept going through the gem case. Ametrine, Tanzanite, Lazurite, Anglesite, Ammolite, Korite and Feldspar all appear, with Plushstone rounding it out. Tanzanite had only been on the market since the late 1960s and ammolite is an Alberta fossil gemstone, so this is a fairly specialist list for a suburban street sign. The result is a single family neighborhood of a bit under two hundred and forty homes where no two street names repeat a mineral.