Meredith Gardens

Meredith Gardens covers 80.6 acres measured against the city's published boundary and holds 383 residential addresses on 17 named streets, which run to 2.72 miles inside the line. Not one address here carries a unit designator, and the assessor classes all 383 as single-family residential, so the community is detached housing without exception. The form is unusually consistent: of the dated structures, 379 are two story and one is single story. The median building is 2,439 square feet on a median lot of 6,407, and 187 homes carry a pool.

City zoning and the general plan both read residential low density across the ground the boundary covers. The whole community sits outside the Coastal Zone appeal jurisdiction. Nothing on the city park layer falls inside the boundary or within 250 meters of it, and the bus stop layer records nine stops within 250 meters but none inside. Streets carry the community's own name at the center, with Meredith Drive and Jon Day Drive holding the most addresses, alongside Ravenwood, Stonybrook, Birchwood, Crailet, Craimer, Midland and Lawson.

Meredith Gardens was established in 1966 by a developer named Eddie Meredith, who was considered a trendsetter at the time because he built split level houses in Southern California rather than the single story ranches everyone else was selling. The neighborhood holds about 400 homes in the pocket formed by Brookhurst Street, Adams Avenue and the Santa Ana River, which makes it the last residential block of Huntington Beach before the Costa Mesa line. The original sales brochure offered six models, the Belmont, Crestmont, Ashland, Hali Luana, Eastland and Carlyle, in split level and two story designs of three, four and five bedrooms.

The county record backs the story, with 358 of the 383 homes finished in the 1960s from 1965 onward, on about 81 acres, and the streets laid out as short circles designed to keep traffic out. Meredith Drive and Jon Day Drive carry the most addresses of the seventeen named streets, with Crailet Drive, Ravenwood Lane, Stonybrook Drive and Birchwood Drive among the rest.