Newport Coast

Newport Coast is not one community but fifteen. The City of Newport Beach maps fifteen association polygons inside its Newport Coast area, all of them under a single master association, and fourteen of the fifteen are recorded as gated; Verona, at 48 units, is the one that is not. The city's own unit counts run from Ocean Heights at 208 and Tesoro at 180 down through Trovare at 170, Los Trancos at 144, Pelican Hill at 138, Altezza and Santa Lucia at 110 each, Pelican Heights at 98, Pelican Crest I at 94 and Campobello at 90, to the three Pelican Ridge associations at 93, 61 and 58. The city zones the whole of it as the Newport Coast Planned Community, PC-52, and its General Plan groups Newport Coast with Newport Ridge and Bonita Canyon as master planned communities built largely by a single builder under their own development standards.

Crystal Cove State Park lies directly below, off Pacific Coast Highway between Corona del Mar and Laguna Beach: 2,791 acres, 3.2 miles of beach and 2,400 acres of backcountry wilderness, with a Historic District of 46 vintage coastal cottages on 12.3 acres. The Resort at Pelican Hill occupies 504 acres at 22701 Pelican Hill Road South, its Ocean North and Ocean South courses holding 36 holes designed by Tom Fazio. On the civic side the Newport Coast Community Center at 6401 San Joaquin Hills Road carries a gymnasium lined for basketball, volleyball and pickleball, a warming kitchen and four rentable rooms named Newport Ridge, Pelican, Newport Coast and Willinger. City parkland runs through the hills as Coastal Peak Park at 11.17 acres, Los Trancos Canyon View Park in three sections of 2.63, 1.16 and 4.05 acres, and the Upper Buck Gully open space at 299.84 acres. Newport Coast Elementary at 6655 Ridge Park Road serves the community, feeding the Corona del Mar 7-12 campus.

The hills went up as the Irvine Coast, planned under a coastal program the county certified in 1988 and built out through the 1990s and into the early 2000s in gated villages carrying Italian and Spanish names. The county recorded thirty seven subdivision maps across the area between 30 October 1990 and 18 June 2002, which is the whole of the buildout in a twelve year run. Newport Coast spent all of that time as unincorporated county territory; the annexation into the City of Newport Beach was approved in 2001 and took effect on the first day of 2002, and the agreement that carried it still obliges the city to keep a Newport Coast advisory committee. It covers about 7.2 square miles of the San Joaquin Hills.

The shore below went the other way. In 1979 the Irvine Company transferred 2,791 acres to the State of California, and that land became Crystal Cove State Park, whose historic district holds forty six beach cottages from the 1920s and 1930s, twenty nine of them restored. That transfer is why the hills above are built and the coast below is not, and why a Newport Coast address looks out over open shore rather than more houses.