Capistrano Garden Homes #1

Capistrano Garden Homes #1 covers 24.23 acres, and the city's address layer records 184 addresses on sixteen named streets inside that boundary. Of the 0.96 miles of street clipped to the boundary, 0.58 miles sit on the city's Private Roads layer and are maintained by the association rather than the city. The zoning layer places 24.2 acres in the Single-Family-4,000 District with a tenth of an acre in the Planned Residential Development District, and the General Plan carries 17.5 acres as Medium High Density, which is the density the four recorded maps were drawn to.

Four interior points were tested against the Capistrano Unified locator and all four returned the same three campuses. San Juan Elementary takes TK through fifth grade with 662 students at a 26 to 1 ratio, Marco Forster Middle 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 splits the boundary, 17.8 acres in the High class and 6.4 acres in Moderate, which sets clearance and construction requirements across most of the association.

The Capistrano Garden Homes went up on the valley floor at the start of the 1970s, in the first decade after San Juan Capistrano became a city. Incorporation came on 19 April 1961, and for most of the century before that this was farm country rather than town. Barley, walnuts and oranges had been planted from the 1880s, the California Central Railroad reached San Juan in 1887 and sent land values up, and the valley ran an orange processing and produce packing plant beside the railroad. What ended it was arithmetic. Growers could not cover their costs, the processing plants were too far away, and one by one the families sold.

The streets carry Spanish names, Calle El Sauzal, Calle Santa Rosalia, Calle San Felipe and Calle Resplendor, on a tract laid out while the valley around it was still farmed. The town turned to defending what was left of that soon afterward. Its citizens wrote a new general plan in 1974 that preserved historic resources and open space, limited development density and provided for ridgeline preservation, and in 1977 the City Council wrote a 230 acre agricultural preserve into it.