Sea Point Estates

Sea Point Estates covers 187.9 acres and holds 264 addresses on 294 parcels, at a median parcel of 0.278 acres. It is the seventh largest of the fifty San Clemente communities mapped here by area and the fifteenth by address count, a gap that comes from open space: 87.5 acres inside the line are private open space against 76.8 acres of Residential Low Density land. Twenty one streets serve it, led by Marbella with 69 addresses, then Campanilla, Cantilena and Marana.

The state fire hazard severity map places 129.9 acres in its High class and 58 in Very High, the fourth largest Very High acreage of the fifty boundaries. Addresses inside the boundary carry the 92673 zip code. Capistrano Unified's own school locator returned San Clemente High, Shorecliffs Middle and Palisades Elementary at all five interior points tested.

Before there was a gate on this hill there was a nickname for it. The ridge above the freeway was called Hang Glider Hill, which tells you how open and how high it was before anybody built on it. Sea Pointe Estates, which is how the community is usually written, started up that slope in the middle 1980s as a custom lot development rather than a builder's tract, and the start was rough. The original developer went bankrupt, which left the first 78 lot owners to put up their own houses one at a time. That is the reason the 259 homes behind the guard gate today share a hillside and an association but not an architect, a decade or a floor plan.

The streets read like a Mediterranean itinerary, Marbella and San Remo and Via Goleta and Cresta Del Sol, and that is an inheritance rather than a whim. Ole Hanson bought this stretch of coast in 1925 and sold roughly two thousand acres of it as a Mediterranean style resort town, with red tile roofs, white exteriors and architectural review written into the terms. San Clemente incorporated in February 1928. Sixty years later, the people opening up the inland hills were still reaching for the same vocabulary, and the buyers still wanted it.