Canyon Hills Estates

Canyon Hills Estates occupies 24.5 acres on Canyon Hills Road and Canyon Ridge Road, half a mile of street in total. The city records 48 addresses on 41 parcels, all detached single family, and the median lot area is 20,000 square feet, a little under half 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-nine of the 41 parcels carry a pool on the assessor record, seven in ten. Every one of the 39 buildings the city's footprint layer measures reads as two-story, at a median 2,940 square feet of ground floor. The boundary lies wholly in ZIP 92807 and in flood zone X. Canyon Hills Estates sits in Orange Unified School District and feeds Canyon High.

Canyon Hills Estates is the large lot end of Anaheim Hills. Forty eight houses spread over twenty four acres, the typical property close to half an acre, twenty nine of them with a pool, and only two streets, Canyon Hills Road and Canyon Ridge Road, which say plainly what the ground does. The houses date from 1978 through 1991, with 1979 the median year, so most arrived in the first big wave and a few filled in later.

The reason a boundary this size holds so few houses is a decision made at the start. Anaheim Hills was the first residential development anywhere to use landform grading, shaping building pads to follow the natural line of a ridge rather than cutting it into flat steps, and close to a thousand acres of the wider community went to public agencies so the slopes would stay open. The sycamore, oak and eucalyptus already growing on these hillsides were kept through construction, and the city bought a separate three hundred acres for a golf course that Richard Bigler laid out and opened in 1972.