Shorecliffs Terrace

Shorecliffs Terrace covers 80.3 acres and holds 216 addresses. Nine of its ten streets begin with Mira, a prefix no other community in the fifty uses: Mira Adelante carries 78 addresses and Mira Las Olas 57, with Mira Collado, Mira Velero, Mira del Sur, Mira del Oeste, Mira del Norte, Mira Allende and Mira Puerta taking the rest, and a single address on Calle Nuevo. It is the thirteenth largest of the fifty by area and the nineteenth by address count.

Private open space accounts for 48.1 acres inside the boundary against 32 acres of Residential Medium Low Density land, so more of this boundary is open space than housing. Fifty seven percent of it falls inside the Forster Ranch Specific Plan area and the rest carries the city's own Residential Medium Low zoning. All 80.3 acres sit in the state's High fire hazard severity class. Capistrano Unified's own school locator returned San Clemente High, Bernice Ayer Middle and Truman Benedict Elementary at all five interior points tested.

Shorecliffs Terrace is not a subdivision in the usual sense. It is a resident owned manufactured home community restricted to people over 55, laid out on the rise above the inland end of the Shorecliffs golf course. Daily life runs through the clubhouse rather than the street: a pool and spa, sauna, gym, billiards room, card rooms, library and a social calendar that residents tend to mention before they mention the house. Mobile homes make up about one percent of San Clemente's occupied housing, 249 of them in the whole city, so this is a rare form of ownership here.

The name comes from the older Shorecliffs down the hill. That neighborhood took shape in the 1960s on the bluffs at the north end of town, single story ranch houses with a members' beach club on the sand below it and the golf course alongside. The course itself covers 139 acres and Interstate 5 cuts straight through it, leaving a seaward half and an inland half, and it is the inland half that Shorecliffs Terrace looks down on. When the city wrote the plan that governs the land around it, the first purpose it listed for that sector was the continued operation of the Shorecliffs course as a championship course, so the fairways below these windows are protected by the same document that allowed the ridges behind them to be built.