Amber Hill

Amber Hill is a compact hillside pocket of 18.9 acres in north Brea, and all 78 of its addresses sit on just two streets: North Strattford Street and North Robert Court, which carry thirty-nine homes each. The city's parcel layer records 86 parcels inside the boundary and describes every one of them as a residence. Lots run to a median of 0.169 acres and the houses on them to a median of 2,363 square feet with four bedrooms.

The whole of the community is zoned R-1 and the general plan carries its 15.7 mapped acres as Low Density Residential, so there is no commercial frontage and no apartment site inside it. The fire hazard severity map the city publishes places all 15.7 of those acres in the Very High class and the landslide layer covers 1.2 acres, both of which are worth raising with an insurer early. Amber Hill sits in Brea Olinda Unified. Mariposa Elementary is the nearest campus at 0.61 miles with 504 students, then Brea Junior High at 1.18 miles with 921, and Brea Olinda High at 1.77 miles with 1,676.

The hills at the north end of Brea were grazing country long before they were building lots. Abel Stearns bought 30,672 acres of the old Ontiveros holdings in 1863 for less than twenty cents an acre, and from 1870 he leased the range to Basque sheep men, Domingo Bastanchury among them, who sold wool east to textile mills recovering from the Civil War and mutton into Los Angeles and San Francisco. The tar that oozed out of these same slopes was a nuisance to the shepherds, who let pioneer families pull up wagons and cart it away for fuel. It gave the town its name, brea being Spanish for tar, and then it gave the town its fortune when drilling in the Brea-Olinda field began in 1896 and wildcatters brought in a major strike in 1898.

Amber Hill sits on land the oil companies held for most of the century that followed. Union Oil ran leases across the Puente Hills from the turn of the century, and by the early 1980s its research operation in Brea employed around seven hundred people. As the oil business contracted the company released hillside acreage for housing, and the seventy-eight homes here went up in 1988 and 1989 on two streets, North Strattford Street and North Robert Court, thirty-nine on each.