Paradise Manor Condominiums

Paradise Manor Condominiums holds 112 separately assessed homes on 3.40 acres, on eight streets that mix Spanish and mountain names. La Naranja carries 24 of the addresses, El Amarillo 20, Slater 20 and El Paraiso 16, with Appalachian, Hood, Pleasant and Euclid carrying eight each. The assessor records three bedrooms on 64 of the homes, two on 46 and one on two, with a median building area of 1,240 square feet on a median lot of 1,320 square feet.

The general plan designates the whole site Medium Density Residential, which allows up to 15 homes to the acre, and FEMA places all of it in Zone X as an area with reduced flood risk due to levee. Garden Grove Unified files this land in study area 1 of its own school locator, which feeds Mamie L. Northcutt Elementary, Stephen R. Fitz Intermediate and Los Amigos High.

The street names inside this one are worth the walk. El Paraiso is the paradise, La Naranja is the orange and El Amarillo is the yellow, all straight Spanish, and they sit beside Appalachian and Hood, which are mountains at opposite ends of the country. There are 112 homes on three and a half acres between Euclid and Slater, most of them three bedrooms, built between 1966 and 1970.

That makes this some of the earliest condominium housing in the city. Fountain Valley was still recognizably a farm town: it had incorporated in 1957, when 160 of its 189 registered voters turned out and 91 voted yes, and the first tract had only broken ground in 1962. The population reached nearly 32,000 by 1970, so a buyer moving in here in 1968 was watching the fields go under at close range.