Birchwood Village

Birchwood Village occupies 25.4 acres along East Birch Street, and 542 of its 543 addresses carry that single street name. Five hundred and forty of them carry a unit designator in the city's own record and the whole site rests on three parcels, and the county parcel record classifies the property as apartments. The general plan carries 23.1 acres inside the boundary as High Density Residential.

Twist and Slide, a brushed steel work by the Orange County sculptor Daniel J. Miller, stands inside the boundary at Birch Street and Associated Road. The whole of the site is mapped as Non-Wildland Fuel with no acreage in any elevated fire class. Birchwood Village is in Brea Olinda Unified, with Brea Country Hills Elementary 0.41 miles away holding 498 students, Brea Olinda High 0.9 miles with 1,676, and Brea Junior High 1.09 miles with 921.

The street this community sits on carries an oil man's name. Birch Street in Brea is named for Albert Otis Birch of the Birch Oil Company, one of the firms working the Brea-Olinda field, and the name is far older than the John Birch Society, which was not founded until 1958. Brea itself is Spanish for tar, taken from the seeps that early residents burned for fuel long before anyone drilled for what lay under them.

East Birch Street runs out through the part of the city that grew last and fastest. The Orange Freeway opened in the 1970s and the Brea Mall went up with it, and through the 1970s and 1980s large industrial parks and retail centers filled the corridor as companies took advantage of a site near the meeting point of four counties. Birchwood Village holds 543 apartment addresses on twenty-five acres of that stretch.