Seagate Lagoons

Seagate Lagoons covers 59.1 acres measured against the city's published boundary and holds 339 residential addresses among the 368 the address layer records inside the line. Only two of those addresses carry a unit designator, and the assessor classes all 339 dwellings as single-family residential. Ten named streets serve the community across 2.2 miles, and eight of them are named for Caribbean islands: Tortola, St Croix, Bimini, Aruba, Bonaire, Dominica, Montego and Bravata, with Windspun Drive carrying the most addresses.

The houses are consistent and the lots are small, which is what happens when a subdivision is cut into dredged waterfront. The assessor's median building is 2,022 square feet with a tenth to ninetieth percentile band of only 1,826 to 2,160, on a median lot of 1,766 square feet, and 313 of the dated structures are two story against one that is single. Forty-seven homes carry a pool. City zoning reads 81.5 percent residential low density with 9.6 percent open space, the open space being water, and the whole boundary sits inside the Coastal Zone appeal jurisdiction in appeal zone 1. The city bus stop layer records no stop inside the boundary or within 250 meters of it.

Seagate sits on the inland side of Huntington Harbour, on ground that was tidal marsh until the 1960s. The Lomita Gun Club had been founded here in 1903, and at least thirteen hunting clubs once worked the Bolsa Chica, Huntington Harbour and Los Patos wetlands. Lewis W. Douglas Jr., president of Christiana Oil Corporation, began planning a residential marina across 860 acres of swamps and sloughs in 1960 and hired the architect William L. Pereira to master plan it. Construction started in 1963 and the dredged channels run 15 to 20 feet deep.

The Lagoons were part of the second wave. Of the 339 homes here, 326 were finished in the 1970s beginning in 1973, spread over roughly 59 acres around interior water rather than the main harbor channels. The naming is Caribbean from end to end. Montego, Tortola, Bimini, Aruba, Bonaire, Dominica, St Croix and Bravata all run off the same few blocks, which is a good shorthand for what the harbor was selling in the early 1970s.