Brea Woods

Brea Woods packs 154 addresses onto 2.5 acres, about 62 to the acre and a density second only to Avalon among the 43 communities the City of Brea maps. All of those addresses sit on West Central Avenue, 153 of them carry a unit designator, and the whole site rests on a single parcel. The general plan carries all 2.5 acres as High Density Residential and the zoning is R-3 across the boundary.

The site is small enough that it holds no street of its own and no public art, and the fire hazard severity map places its 2.5 acres in the High class. Brea Woods sits close in to the Brea Olinda campuses: Mariposa Elementary is 0.19 miles away with 504 students, Brea Junior High 0.49 miles with 921, and Brea Olinda High 1.08 miles with 1,676. Two other communities share West Central Avenue with it, Heritage Plaza and part of Raintree, and the parcel record describes all three as apartment property.

The ground under Brea Woods went to orange groves in the 1920s and then to housing. The change of gear came in the 1970s, when the Orange Freeway opened and the Brea Mall was built, pulling the city's commercial center a mile east of the old grid and drawing industrial parks and retail through the 1970s and 1980s as companies came for a site near the meeting point of four Southern California counties. Attached housing followed the jobs.

Brea Woods is 154 homes stacked onto two and a half acres, all of them addressed off a single street, which makes it one of the densest addresses in the city. The whole of it sits inside the liquefaction zone the city maps on the valley floor, which is a soils question rather than a hillside one and worth a word with an inspector.