Pacific Hills

Pacific Hills covers 231.5 acres, the third largest boundary in this guide, and records 602 addresses on 602 parcels at a median lot of 0.142 acres. Twenty eight streets run 4.87 miles inside it, and one strand of the naming is Italian: Alato, Altezza, Aria, Avanti, Brio, Carino, Chimera, Fiera and Regalo sit alongside the Pacific names that give the community its own. Pacific Hills Park sits inside the boundary at 28050 Fieldcrest, 7.81 acres with a soccer and football field, a basketball court, a playground, eight picnic tables and five barbecues.

The general plan carries 203.5 acres at up to 3.5 homes an acre and 65.7 acres as recreation and open space, the largest open space acreage of the fifty communities in this guide. The flood layer places 231 acres in zone X and half an acre in zone AE. Capistrano Unified serves the boundary, and its locator returns Philip J. Reilly Elementary at some interior points and Bathgate Elementary at others, with Fred Newhart Middle at 1,105 and Capistrano Valley High at 1,991 common to both.

Pacific Hills went up between 1990 and 1997, built out by eight builders working side by side across roughly a dozen sub-tracts: Barratt, Buie, Lewis Homes, UDC, Brighton, Standard Pacific, Kaufman and Broad, and Fieldstone. Together they put up about 1,200 single-family homes, from starter-sized houses near 1,500 square feet up to estates over 3,700 square feet. New Homes Magazine ran a feature on the community in 1990 and called it "The Peak of Residential Artistry," a nod to the Mediterranean look the builders settled on across the tract: stucco walls, red Spanish tile roofs and arched entries repeated house after house.

The neighborhood sits between La Paz Road and Oso Parkway, with Marguerite Parkway on the west and Felipe Road on the east, on hillside ground that was still open when the Mission Viejo Company drew its original master plan in the 1960s. By the time Pacific Hills broke ground the company had passed through Philip Morris ownership and was working through the last of the steeper, harder-to-build homes on the ranch. Rather than grade through the two canyons that cross the site, the builders bent the streets into curves and cul-de-sacs around them, leaving both canyons as protected wildlife habitat that still splits the neighborhood into separate pocket clusters today.