Kite Hill

Kite Hill covers 237.3 acres across four pieces of the city's HOA layer and holds 633 addresses on 651 parcels, at a median lot of 0.189 acres. Forty-two named streets run 5.21 miles inside the boundary and nearly every one is a bird: Bobolink, Murrelet, Shrike, Chat, Avocet, Curlew, Plover, Snipe, Kestrel, Loon, Nuthatch, Grosbeak and Canvasback among them, with Kite Hill Drive itself carrying 1.34 miles. The city's zoning layer gives 119.5 acres to Single Family District 3 and 9.2 acres to Single Family District 4, with 64.8 acres open space and 6.7 acres zoned park and recreation.

The city's HOA zoning lookup records Kite Hill as not gated, with public streets, and lists 603 units. Kite Hill is the largest ungated boundary in Laguna Niguel by unit count outside the two big master associations. The city's Open Space Inventory covers a substantial share of the boundary, and the park and recreation zoning inside it is the association's own recreation ground rather than city park land.

Kite Hill was built by a man who escaped Auschwitz. Nathan Shapell was born in Poland in 1922, was deported to Buchenwald and then Auschwitz as a teenager, escaped, built housing for homeless Jews in Germany after the war, and moved to Los Angeles in 1952 after reading about the city in a magazine. In 1955 he founded Shapell Industries with his brother David and his brother in law Max Webb, and over the next half century he put up more than 65,000 houses in California. Kite Hill is one of them, named on his record alongside Porter Ranch and the old MGM ranch in Thousand Oaks.

The work here was done by S&S Construction Company through the 1970s and 1980s, more than 600 homes, and the city's record agrees: years built from 1975 to 2003 with a median of 1983, and 110 homes dated 1978 alone. In 1981 S&S donated another twenty acres to the county, an extension of Laguna Niguel Regional Park that took the Kite Hill name and was developed as a model glider area with a restroom, picnic area and parking, free to the public.