Ashton Court

Ashton Court covers 10.7 acres, the second smallest boundary of the fifty communities in this guide behind Park Aliso Villa, and records 150 addresses on a single parcel with 149 unit designators. Eight streets touch it, among them Juan Crespi, Portola and Vicente Lugo, names drawn from the Spanish expedition that crossed this country in 1769, running 0.56 miles inside the boundary.

The general plan carries all 10.6 classified acres at the city's highest residential density, 14 to 30 homes an acre, a designation the city's plan uses on very little ground. The whole boundary sits in flood zone X. Capistrano Unified serves it, and the district's locator returns Bathgate Elementary at 570 students, Fred Newhart Middle at 1,105 and Capistrano Valley High at 1,991 from every interior point tested.

Ashton went up in 1989, a year after Mission Viejo incorporated as its own city on 31 March 1988. By then the ground was no longer the Mission Viejo Company's alone to shape; it was city land, and Ashton's 150 condominium units rose in the newer, southern part of town, between Napoli Park and Barbadanes Park, carrying on the Mediterranean look, vaulted ceilings and two-story layouts that had become the local standard by the late 1980s.

That timing puts Ashton toward the tail end of the master-planned build-out that began in 1965 with the first $21,000 homes and had, by 1986, already produced the community's 20,000th house. Ashton is a much later, smaller chapter of that same story, built for the young city rather than for the unincorporated county land the earliest 1960s and 1970s neighborhoods went up on.