Rancho San Clemente

Rancho San Clemente is a master association covering 284.6 acres and 1,291 addresses on 1,032 parcels, at a median parcel of 0.129 acres. That makes it the third largest of the fifty San Clemente communities mapped here by area and the second by address count. Fifty four streets run inside it, and one of them, Via Presa, carries 200 addresses on its own, the second heaviest single street in the fifty boundaries behind Calle Amistad in Talega.

Residential Low Density land accounts for 92.6 acres, private open space for 69.7, public right of way for 44.7 and Residential Medium Low Density for 33.7. The whole boundary sits inside the Rancho San Clemente Specific Plan area, which the plan puts at about 1,943 acres running from under 80 feet to more than 900 feet above sea level. The state fire hazard severity map places 275.2 acres in its High class and 9.4 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.

These hills were still ranch land when the city rewrote its General Plan in July 1982. Alongside it the City Council passed a hillside ordinance and a zoning change that put the four big inland ranch properties, Talega, Forster Ranch, Marblehead Inland and Rancho San Clemente, into a single holding pattern: no more than 1.5 homes per gross acre, and no building at all until each landowner produced a detailed plan. The Council adopted the Rancho San Clemente plan on 16 November 1983, by Ordinance 876, then amended it in 1989. The plan area runs to about 1,943 acres and climbs from under 80 feet above sea level to more than 900, which is the real reason two houses a block apart can have completely different views.

What the plan protected is as telling as what it allowed. Its stated objective was to keep the primary ridgeline, the knoll above Avenida Pico and the perimeter slopes out of the graded area, and the land use table shows how far that went: roughly 1,097 of the 1,943 acres are open space. Housing was concentrated in a bowl around the Calle Del Cerro and Avenida Vista Montana loop with a ridgeline walking trail, a neighborhood park and an elementary school inside it, while the working half of the community, the business park, the industrial sites and the Richard Steed Memorial Park softball fields, was pushed out along Calle Amanecer and Avenida La Pata. Construction then ran through the 1980s and 1990s in separate named neighborhoods rather than one continuous subdivision, so dues, rules and house styles change as you cross from one to the next.