Yorktown Villas

Yorktown Villas covers 15.2 acres measured against the city's published boundary and holds 219 residential addresses among the 230 the address layer records inside the line. The assessor classes all 219 as condominium units. Three named streets serve them across 0.52 miles: Pettswood Drive, Bickley Drive and Bromley Lane, all three English names. The boundary fills 99.3 percent of its own convex hull.

The homes are small and close to identical. The assessor's median building is 1,094 square feet with a tenth to ninetieth percentile band of only 1,020 to 1,174, and 155 of the dated structures are two story against 55 that are single. Twelve addresses carry a pool. City zoning and the general plan both read 77.8 percent of the ground as residential medium density. The community straddles two ZIP codes, 92646 and 92648, sits outside the Coastal Zone appeal jurisdiction, and has Bushard Park within 250 meters with five bus stops in the same distance.

All 219 homes in Yorktown Villas were built in the 1970s, between 1971 and 1974, on about 15 acres, with only three streets in the whole plan: Pettswood Drive, Bickley Drive and Bromley Lane. All three name places in the London Borough of Bromley, in what used to be Kent, and none of them tells you anything about the ground here, because the ground was farmland.

The scale of what happened here in ten years is hard to overstate. Huntington Beach had 11,492 residents in 1960. By 1970 it had 115,960, a rise of more than nine hundred percent, and the fields went under. What those fields grew was lima beans, asparagus, peppers, celery and sugar beets, with Holly Sugar running a plant at Main Street and Garfield Avenue from 1911 until oil was found on the property in 1921 and closed it.