Bella Vista

Bella Vista covers 119.7 acres and the county records 359 parcels and 351 site addresses inside the boundary, at a median distinct legal lot of 6,350 square feet. Twenty one named streets run 4.11 miles within it, among them Golden West Ave, Raitt St, Monta Vista Ave, Charles Common and Bamdal St. The zoning layer gives 46.7 acres to single family residence and 13.7 acres to multiple family residence, with 28.3 acres carried as open space land.

That open space is Jerome Park, which the city records at 19.3 acres inside the boundary with a municipal pool, a recreation center, a senior center, a community garden, a ball diamond and courts for basketball and handball, and the joint use field at Monte Vista Elementary adds 2.4 acres beside it. Santa Ana Unified covers the whole boundary and two campuses sit inside it, Monte Vista Elementary and Lorin Griset Academy.

This is ground that matters in the county's civil rights history. African American families began settling in Santa Ana between 1910 and 1930, first along Bristol Street between Second and Fourth and along Artesia, now Raitt, between Fifth and Eighth. Before the Supreme Court decided Reitman v. Mulkey in 1967, Black residents of Orange County were largely confined to one part of Santa Ana known as Little Texas. After the war families bought along Sixth, Seventh and Eighth between Bristol and Raitt, and the stretch running from Bristol down to McFadden and west to Sullivan became the new hub of Black Santa Ana. Helen Marie Shipp, born in Georgia in 1935, founded the Orange County Black History Parade. The first one went downtown on February 9, 1980, and from 1981 to 1985 the parade ran through the residential streets of the Jerome-Corbin neighborhood, which is now Bella Vista, before returning to Main Street in 1986, by which point it was drawing more than 20,000 spectators.

The houses match that story. A first group went up in the 1950s and most of the rest in the 1960s, on land that had been farmed since the days of Rancho Santiago de Santa Ana, while the city's population doubled from about 45,500 in 1950 to just over 100,000 in 1960.