Anaheim Ridge

Anaheim Ridge runs along Avenida de Santiago and Via El Estribo, two streets over 39.8 acres. The city records 48 addresses on 34 parcels, all detached single family, and the median lot area is 39,204 square feet, a little under nine tenths of an acre. The general plan designates the entire boundary Residential Estate at up to 1.5 homes to the acre, and zoning is Hillside Single-Family Residential with a 22,000 square foot minimum lot.

Twenty-six of the 34 parcels carry a pool on the assessor record. The city's footprint layer measures the houses at a median 4,460 square feet of ground floor area, the largest of any community in this section apart from Peralta Hills East and Hidden Canyon Estates. Only eight tenths of a mile of public street runs inside the boundary, a consequence of the lot sizes. Everything falls in ZIP 92807 and in flood zone X. Anaheim Ridge sits in Orange Unified School District and feeds Canyon High.

Anaheim Ridge sits high on a ridge off Avenida de Santiago, a street that borrows the rancho's own name, with Via El Estribo running off it, and the lots are nothing like the tract ground below: the median home here is close to a full acre and most of them have a pool. The houses began going up in 1978 and the neighborhood filled in through the early 1980s, with a few built much later on lots that stayed empty. Anaheim Hills was the first residential development to use landform grading, which rounds a graded slope so it reads as natural hillside rather than a terrace, and on a ridgeline like this one that decision is the whole look of the place.

The ridge also has the hardest story in Anaheim Hills. Heavy El Nino rain that started in late 1992 saturated the ground, and in January 1993 the hillside around Serrano Avenue and Avenida de Santiago began to move. More than thirty homes were destroyed and over two hundred were affected, and families were evacuated with cracks opening across driveways and streets. After litigation in 1999 the city formed the Santiago Geologic Hazard Abatement District, which covers 305 properties and exists to do one thing: keep the water out of the slope. It runs 87 drain lines, 37 wells and 15 meters and pumps roughly 15 million gallons of groundwater off the hill every year, and the ground has held for three decades because of it.