Laguna Altura

Laguna Altura is Planning Area 18 in the City of Irvine's record, and the City's village polygon of that name measures 774 acres. Most of that was never going to be neighborhood. The General Plan's own acreage table allocates the planning area 447 acres of preservation out of 752, against 155 acres of low density and 150 acres of medium density residential, and its intensity table allows 597 medium density units and 258 low density units and nothing else. What a buyer shops is the 141.5-acre footprint of the Laguna Altura Community Association, which sits south of the San Diego Freeway and northeast of Laguna Canyon Road and holds 598 residential address points on fourteen streets: Bianco, Borghese, Brindisi, Chianti, Cipresso, Como, Domani, Genoa, Livia, Lupari, Modena, Tesoro, Triana and Umbria. Powerstone Property Management runs the association, and two gated entrance points stand inside the footprint in the City's gated-community entrance layer, which leaves the community name blank on both, so the entrances are counted here and nothing is said about how they are staffed.

Recreation here is private and small. The Orange County Register reported a pool, three parks and a scenic walking trail when the village opened, and the City's own Planning Area 18 tract map names the three parks Giardino Altura, Giardino Della Vista and Giardino Del Centro. No City of Irvine park polygon falls anywhere inside the village; the nearest is Los Olivos Community Park, 8.72 acres at 101 Alfonso about 666 meters from the association footprint, with a playground, four tennis courts, a basketball court and restrooms. One feature of this planning area changes how every figure here should be read. It carries a second master association, Hidden Canyon Community Assn., on 140.9 acres with 261 residential addresses and a different management company, and CRMLS files both under the single MLS area LGA - Laguna Altura. No school campus stands inside the village. Irvine Unified assigns it to Alderwood Elementary, then Rancho San Joaquin Middle and University High, each read from the district's own attendance area map effective 2026 to 2027.

The village opened under a name it had only just been given. When the Irvine Company broke ground in February 2011 on the first of 596 homes on this hillside, the project was still called Laguna Crossing. By the time the sales office and model homes opened on 14 May 2011 it was Laguna Altura. Dan Young, the company's homebuilding chief, presented it and Stonegate together as the Irvine Pacific Collection, 1,250 homes between the two, and called the pair the largest villages to come to Orange County since Portola Springs opened in July 2006. Irvine Pacific, the Irvine Company's own homebuilding arm, built it out between 2011 and 2014 across four neighborhoods named for Italian places, Siena, San Remo, Cortona and Toscana, in stucco and clay tile with stone, arched openings, courtyards and ornamental ironwork.

The canyon this village looks down was the site of one of the biggest land fights Orange County has had. The Irvine Company had proposed roughly 3,200 homes, 82 acres of commercial space and a golf course in Laguna Canyon. In 1989 the photographers Jerry Burchfield and Mark Chamberlain built The Tell, a 636-foot photomural made from more than 60,000 donated photographs, and staked it out at the proposed development site. That November about 8,000 people walked from the Festival of Arts grounds out toward it. Laguna Beach voters approved a property tax increase in 1990 to begin buying the land, the Laguna Canyon Foundation was formed the same year to finish the acquisitions, and the canyon is now Laguna Coast Wilderness Park, 7,000 acres reached from Laguna Canyon Road. Anyone driving from these gates down to the beach is driving through the argument.