Fernhill

Fernhill covers 13.2 acres measured against the city's published boundary and holds 120 residential addresses among the 121 the address layer records inside the line. No address carries a unit designator and the assessor classes all 120 dwellings as single-family residential. The boundary fills 100.0 percent of its own convex hull, one of only two perfectly convex shapes on this register. Eight named streets serve the community across 0.67 miles, five of them drawn from the mining west: Bonanza Drive, Red Rock Circle, Ruby Circle, Agate Circle and Diamond Drive, alongside Canyon Lane, Overland Drive and Coach Lane.

The city's general plan designates the whole boundary residential high density, and the city zoning layer carries the same designation with the word residential misspelled in its own record. The assessor's median building is 1,389 square feet on a median lot of 1,847, with a tenth to ninetieth percentile band of 1,330 to 1,645, and 83 of the dated structures are single story against 36 that are two. Eighteen addresses carry a pool. The community sits outside the Coastal Zone appeal jurisdiction and the bus stop layer records three stops within 250 meters.

Fernhill went up in 1964, in the middle of the strangest decade in this city's history. Huntington Beach had 11,492 residents in 1960. By 1970 it had 115,960, a jump of more than nine hundred percent, and almost all of that arrived as tract housing thrown across old farmland in a few short years. Fernhill is a clean example of the type. All 120 of its homes carry a 1964 build year, on about 13 acres, which means the whole neighborhood was framed and roofed inside a single year.

The street names here belong to a different landscape altogether. Canyon, Overland, Bonanza, Red Rock, Ruby and Agate read like a mining district, which was the fashion when the tract was drawn, and they have nothing to do with the flat coastal ground they were laid on. That gap between the name and the place is one of the honest signatures of the 1960s in Orange County.