Marblehead Coastal

Marblehead Coastal covers 248 acres southwest of Interstate 5 and holds 404 addresses on 387 parcels, 80 of them carrying a unit designator. Fourteen streets serve it, most named for Spanish cities: Via Galicia carries 70 addresses, then Via Murcia, Via Pamplona, Via Salamanca, Via Bilbao and Via San Sebastian, with W Avenida Vista Hermosa running through with 94. It is the fifth largest of the fifty San Clemente communities mapped here.

Private open space accounts for 112.3 acres inside the boundary, regional commercial land for 51.7 and Residential Low Density for 44.7. Five city parks fall inside the line, more than any other community in the fifty, the largest being Jim Johnson Memorial Sports Park at 8.6 acres. So do 3.3 miles of city trail, 3.1 of them the Sea Summit, and 95 acres the city maps as coastal canyon. All 248 acres sit in the state's High fire hazard severity class. Capistrano Unified's own school locator returned San Clemente High, Shorecliffs Middle and Clarence Lobo Elementary at all five interior points tested.

Marblehead Coastal was the last large piece of open coast left in San Clemente, and its history is the argument over what to build on it, carried on for more than thirty years. In July 1982 the city council put the bluff into a coastal development district that allowed no more than seven homes per acre and required detailed planning before anything went up. The plan drawn under that rule called for as many as 1,198 homes and set aside a site here for the presidential library of Richard M. Nixon. The California Coastal Commission never certified it, the library site was never built, and the Nixon library opened in Yorba Linda in July 1990 instead.

Ground was broken in January 2015 and the houses went up as Sea Summit, with a large retail center and the Avenida Vista Hermosa interchange below them. The shops were never an afterthought: sales tax revenue was written into the plan from the start as the way to pay for the interchange and for public access to the coast, and the trail network that runs along the blufftop and down toward the beach is the public half of that bargain, agreed decades before anyone moved in. Fred Swegles, writing in the San Clemente Times in 2020, counted 309 homes on the finished property along with parks, trails, an ecological preserve and the outlet center, which is roughly a quarter of what the first plan for this bluff proposed. The bluff itself was part of Rancho Boca de la Playa, the 6,607 acre grant Governor Pio Pico made in 1846, ground that reached Ole Hanson by way of the Goldschmidt brothers, who bought it in 1906 and tried to plant vineyards.