Harbor View Estates

Harbor View Estates covers 61.8 acres and holds 216 addresses on 254 parcels, at a median parcel of 0.158 acres. Sixteen streets serve it, led by Rio Lindo with 33 addresses, then Avenida Ossa, Bolivia and La Salle. It is the 21st largest of the fifty San Clemente communities mapped here by area and the 18th by address count.

Residential Low Density land accounts for 34.2 acres inside the boundary, private open space for 15.8 and public right of way for 10.6. The whole boundary lies inside the Rancho San Clemente Specific Plan area and belongs to the Rancho San Clemente master association. The state fire hazard severity map places 52.5 acres in its High class and 9.3 in Very High. Capistrano Unified's own school locator returned San Clemente High, Bernice Ayer Middle and Clarence Lobo Elementary at all five interior points tested.

Harbor View Estates is named for something you can only see from it. The homes sit high on the Rancho San Clemente ridge, and from the front row the view runs north up the coast to Dana Point Harbor as well as straight out at the ocean and Catalina. The community was first developed in the middle 1990s, later than most of the hillside around it.

The ground is the reason the view has held. Rancho San Clemente covers roughly 1,943 acres and climbs from under 80 feet above sea level to more than 900, and the city's plan for it treats the primary ridgeline and the prominent knoll beside Avenida Pico as features to be preserved rather than as building sites. Most of the community around Harbor View went up through the 1980s and 1990s, in a set of named subdivisions that funnel down toward Calle Del Cerro, so the streets at the top carry almost no traffic that is not going home.