Alipaz

Alipaz covers 23.64 acres off Alipaz Street in San Juan Capistrano, and the city's address layer records 161 addresses on seven named streets: Del Zura, Paseo Toscana, Pila Degracia, Via Corrizo, Via Flor, Via Los Santos and Vivente de Marlita. All 1.06 miles of street inside the boundary also appear on the city's Private Roads layer, so the association maintains them rather than the city. The zoning layer places 23.5 acres in the Residential Garden-4,000 District and the General Plan carries 23.6 acres as Medium High Density, which is the pattern the recorded maps set with 154 numbered lots between them. Three water facility sites sit inside the boundary on city record: San Juan Basin Authority Well No. 2 and Well No. 4, and Capistrano Valley Water District Well Site No. 1.

Four interior points were tested against the Capistrano Unified locator and all four returned the same three campuses, so the assignment holds across the whole boundary. Kinoshita Elementary takes TK through fifth grade with 302 students at a 22 to 1 ratio and feeds directly into Marco Forster Middle, which enrolls 930, and San Juan Hills High School enrolls 2,641 and graduated 96.2 percent of its class. The Fire Hazard Severity Zone layer places all 23.6 acres in the Non-Wildland Fuel class, and the flood layer puts 18.4 acres in Zone X with one acre in Zone AO.

Alipaz Street runs down the flat west side of San Juan Capistrano, and the farm it crosses has been worked without a break since 1868. In 1868 Joel Rathbone Congdon came here with his wife Mary and his brother-in-law J. P. Fuller, and took 160 acres along what is now Alipaz Road between Del Obispo and El Camino Real. Congdon had come west from New York in 1854 at sixteen, by rail, boat and mule, and had worked ranches and mines before he settled here. He planted 35 acres of English walnuts, which made him a pioneer of the crop in south Orange County, and in 1876 he began a house for his eight children. The redwood came up from San Francisco by boat. The foundation did not travel at all: it was cut from sandstone slabs of the Great Stone Church, which the earthquake of 8 December 1812 had brought down on the congregation at the mission a mile away.

The houses on this street came more than a century after his. They went up from 2001 on small lots off a run of Spanish street names, Via Flor, Via Los Santos, Paseo Toscana, within walking distance of the Congdon farmhouse and of the ground the city voted in 1990 to keep out of the hands of developers. That is a fair summary of what happened in this valley: the town let the farmland go, then bought a piece of it back.