Pacifica San Clemente

Pacifica San Clemente covers 49.7 acres and holds 162 addresses on 183 parcels, at a median parcel of 0.134 acres. Six streets serve it and Via Sonrisa carries 68 of the addresses on its own, with Via Palacio taking another 41 and Calle Maravilla, Via Marbrisa, Via Onda and Via Asalea sharing the rest. It is the 26th largest of the fifty San Clemente communities mapped here.

Residential Low Density land accounts for 21.9 acres inside the boundary, private open space for 19 and public right of way for 7.8. A 0.16 acre corner of the city's Vista Hermosa Park falls inside the line. The whole boundary lies inside the Rancho San Clemente Specific Plan area. The state fire hazard severity map places 33.2 acres in its High class and 16.5 in Moderate. Capistrano Unified's own school locator returned San Clemente High, Bernice Ayer Middle and Truman Benedict Elementary at all five interior points tested.

Pacifica San Clemente is a gated pocket of Rancho San Clemente up near Avenida Vista Hermosa, behind the Lowe's center, and its houses went up in 1998 and 1999. A corner of the city's Vista Hermosa Park falls inside its boundary.

All of it sits on Rancho San Clemente, 1,943 acres of hill ground the city brought under its own plan in November 1983 after adopting a hillside ordinance and a development district that held the four inland ranches to one and a half homes per gross acre. That plan was unusual for its time in deliberately mixing a business park and an industrial park in among the housing, so that the people living up here could also work up here, which is why the lower edge of the ranch is offices and vehicle services rather than more subdivisions. Ole Hanson's town of 1925 was two thousand acres of beach grid; this is the hill country behind it, planned nearly sixty years later by a city rather than by one man.