Highland Light Village

Highland Light Village covers 62.9 acres in the Marblehead Inland Specific Plan area and holds 258 addresses. Eight streets serve it, and three of them carry most of the community: Via Aguila with 74 addresses, Via Teca with 71 and Camino Laurel with 60. Paseo Laro, Via Golondrina, Via Mango, Calle Chayote and Via Merla take the remainder. It is the 20th largest of the fifty San Clemente communities mapped here by area and the 16th by address count.

Residential Low Density land accounts for 53.7 acres inside the boundary and public right of way for 9.1. The state fire hazard severity map places 41.2 acres in its Moderate class and 21.7 in High. Capistrano Unified's own school locator returned San Clemente High, Shorecliffs Middle and Clarence Lobo Elementary at all five interior points tested.

Highland Light Village is the bigger and later half of the Highland Light name. The city approved its own area plan in 1985 and the 258 homes were built between 1985 and 1988, a few years behind the 95 houses of Highland Light proper. Owners belong to the Highland Light Villages association and, above that, to the Marblehead Community Association that covers the whole inland plan, so the architectural rules come from two places at once.

The village was built for the view and the paperwork proves it. The plan carries a separate height restriction exhibit written for Highland Light Village, one of four in the Marblehead Inland plan, and any fence or wall that affects the view from another lot has to clear the architectural committee. The site sits above Interstate 5, which is why so many of these houses look at water rather than at hillside, and the Sea Summit development on the coastal side of the freeway, which arrived decades later, changed what some of them see. The streets read like a field guide: Via Aguila, Via Golondrina and Via Merla for the eagle, the swallow and the blackbird, and Via Mango, Via Teca, Calle Chayote and Camino Laurel for trees and fruit.