United Laguna Woods Mutual

United Laguna Woods Mutual covers 585 acres of Laguna Woods and holds 6,325 residences on sixteen streets, all of them carrying Spanish names such as Avenida Carmel, Ronda Granada, Via Alhambra and Via Mariposa. The residences sit in 1,502 buildings and the city gives a size to 1,499 of them: 575 hold four homes apiece, 491 hold eight, 241 hold three, 131 hold six and 56 hold sixteen. The streets are private and most of them end in a turning circle, with the city's record counting 91 cul-de-sacs and 179 street lights inside the boundary. All of United carries the city's Residential Community designation, and 512.2 of its acres fall in planning unit 7-A, which the general plan holds to between ten and fewer than thirteen homes an acre.

Ownership here is cooperative. The corporation owns all the real property, including the dwelling units, the carports and the laundry facilities, and each member holds shares in the corporation and occupies one particular manor under an occupancy agreement; the association publishes 6,323 cooperative memberships. Residents are also members of the Golden Rain Foundation, which runs the Village's shared amenities: seven clubhouses, five pools, two fitness centers, two golf courses, a ten court tennis complex with light timers on five of the courts, two garden centers, and the Equestrian Center, whose Saddle Club of Laguna Woods Village was founded in 1966, along with the private bus system, the gates and the roads. The Census places all 585 acres in Saddleback Valley Unified, whose own locator returns Olivewood Elementary, enrolling 396, and La Paz Intermediate, enrolling 713, for addresses tested inside the boundary.

Ross Cortese bought a portion of the Moulton Ranch in 1962, ground the city describes as dry farming and cattle grazing with scattered ranch buildings before that decade, and Leisure World Laguna Hills received its first residents in 1964. United Laguna Woods Mutual is the corporation that came out of that first build. It is a non-profit cooperative housing corporation which owns and manages all the real property within what the association calls the original 21 cooperative mutuals, and it is the reason a buyer here acquires shares and an occupancy agreement rather than a deed.

The developer's name is still in the city's code. Laguna Woods' general plan applies its Residential Community designation to housing within the Laguna Woods Village planned unit development at densities consistent with the Rossmoor Leisure World Planning Community District Regulations, more than sixty years after the first residents arrived.