Pleasant Hills

Pleasant Hills covers 41 acres in northwest Brea and holds 110 addresses on seven streets: Steele, Wardman, Berenice, Puente, Bonnie, Sandra and Harvey. The parcel layer counts 108 parcels, every one residential, on lots running to a median of 0.307 acres, the second largest among Brea's communities of detached houses after Olinda Village, with structures to a median of 2,186 square feet and three bedrooms.

The general plan carries 33.6 acres as Low Density Residential and the zoning is R-1 throughout. The fire hazard map splits the community, with 24.4 acres outside the wildland classification and 9.2 acres in the Moderate class and nothing above it. Pleasant Hills is in Brea Olinda Unified, with Mariposa Elementary 0.93 miles away holding 504 students, Brea Junior High 1.3 miles with 921, and Brea Olinda High 2.15 miles with 1,676.

Pleasant Hills is older than most of Brea's neighborhoods. The oil boom had run to the 1940s and citrus carried the town through the depression, but by the 1950s the groves were being taken for housing and the city had tied into the Metropolitan Water District, which made real subdivision possible. The homes here went up between 1957 and 1965, semi-custom rather than tract-built, with unusual floor plans and deep back yards.

The streets carry people rather than themes: Berenice, Bonnie, Harvey, Sandra, Steele and Wardman. Naming courts after family members was ordinary practice for a small builder working a handful of blocks at a time, and it is the surest sign that this was not laid out by a corporation. Berenice Drive continues west into the Brea West tract, which was built a decade later, so the two neighborhoods share a street and almost nothing else.