The Bluffs

The Bluffs covers 35.4 acres measured against the city's published boundary and sits entirely inside the Holly-Seacliff Specific Plan area. The address layer records 116 addresses inside the line and types 85 as residential, all classed single-family by the assessor with no unit designators. Six named streets serve them across 0.93 miles and they hold to one image throughout: Clearview Lane, Fairwind Circle, Setting Sun Drive, Evening Breeze Circle, Evening Star Circle and Twilight Drive.

The scale here is the largest on the register. The assessor's median building is 4,454 square feet, with the tenth to ninetieth percentile band running from 3,937 to 6,084, on a median lot of 10,258 square feet. Seventy-one of the 85 dwellings carry a pool, which is better than four in five. City zoning reads the whole boundary as specific plan designation and the general plan designates 81.1 percent of it residential low density. A narrow 8.4 percent of the boundary falls inside the Coastal Zone appeal jurisdiction, in appeal zone 3, and the rest sits outside it. Huntington Central Park West lies within 250 meters.

The Bluffs takes its name from the low rise of ground that runs inland from the coast, and its streets, Setting Sun Drive, Twilight Drive, Evening Star Circle, Evening Breeze Circle, Fairwind Circle and Clearview Lane, are all about the view west. Of the 85 homes, 65 date to the late 1990s beginning in 1999, with the rest filled in through the 2000s and 2010s across about 35 acres.

The same view took in a river. The Freeman ran year round out of the peat springs in what is now Huntington Central Park until the Bolsa Chica Gun Club had it dammed around January 1900, and the courts confirmed in 1907 that the club could keep the dam. What is left of the river is a shallow trace through the Shipley Nature Center.