Seabridge Village

Seabridge Village covers 37.8 acres measured against the city's published boundary and sits entirely inside the Seabridge Specific Plan area. The address layer records 443 addresses inside the line and types 422 as residential, of which 381 carry a unit designator, and the assessor classes 428 as condominium units. Seventeen named streets serve the community across 2.17 miles and they hold to a single vocabulary of water and shoreline, running Bayfront, Racepoint, Mainsail, Sealpoint, Tidepool, Portview, Sandcove, Bridgeside, Bridgepoint, Waterford, Waterspray, Seabright, Seawater and Sealargo.

The boundary is the most compact of any large community on this register, filling 98.7 percent of its own convex hull. City zoning reads the whole of it as specific plan designation and the general plan designates all of it residential high density. The assessor's median building is 1,149 square feet with a tenth to ninetieth percentile band of 924 to 1,407, and 22 addresses carry a pool. The community sits outside the Coastal Zone appeal jurisdiction. Drew Park and Bartlett Park lie within 250 meters, and the city bus stop layer records ten stops within the same distance, the most of any community here.

Seabridge Village is 422 townhomes on about 38 acres, laid out along interior waterways with bridges over them, which is where the name comes from. Four hundred of those homes were finished in the 1980s beginning in 1983, with a small number added later. The street names all take the water seriously, Bayfront Lane, Racepoint Drive, Mainsail Drive, Sealpoint Lane, Tidepool Circle and Cape Hope Circle.

The real water nearby is older and stranger than the channels here. Before 1899 the Bolsa Chica marsh had a natural ocean entrance, and a river called the Freeman ran year round into it out of the peat springs in what is now Huntington Central Park. The Bolsa Chica Gun Club, a hunting club whose members included Henry Huntington and Edward Doheny, hired Tom Talbert to dam the Freeman, a job finished around January 1900 at a cost of 10,000 dollars. The state supreme court ruled in 1907 that the river was a drainage ditch rather than a navigable stream, so the dam stayed.