Hidden Lakes Townhomes

Hidden Lakes Townhomes covers 16.5 acres east of Harbor Boulevard, and five of its six street names are drawn from water: Blue Water Lane, Clear Springs Drive, Lazy Creek Circle, Quiet Brook Circle and Shady Brook Drive, with Shade Tree Lane the sixth. The record holds 197 addresses on three parcels with 0.77 miles of private street, and the city zones all 16.4 mapped acres R-3 Limited Density Multiple Family Residential under a Medium Density Residential general plan designation.

Lions Field is at 1440 North Brea Boulevard on six acres, open since 2010, with baseball and softball, a football field, a concession stand, parking, recreation trails and restrooms. Beechwood Elementary is 0.88 miles out at 872 students in grades K through 8, Laguna Road Elementary 0.95 miles at 623 and Fullerton Union High 0.71 miles at 1,880. The state liquefaction zone covers 9.7 of the 16.5 acres.

Hidden Lakes was built in 1979 and 1980 as townhouses, 197 of them on 16.5 acres about a mile from downtown Fullerton. The homes run from under 800 square feet to around 1,360, so the community mixes small flats and three bedroom family plans on the same shared greenbelts rather than sorting them into separate tracts.

Every street name is about water or shade, and quietly so: Blue Water, Clear Springs, Lazy Creek, Quiet Brook, Shady Brook and Shade Tree. Not one of them names a place, a person or a plant. For a development finished at the turn of the 1980s the naming is a straightforward promise about how the place would feel to live in.