Capistrano Garden Homes #2 (Las Brisas)

Capistrano Garden Homes #2, carried on the city register as Las Brisas, covers 30.77 acres, and the city's address layer records 181 addresses on seven named streets: Calle Bonita, Calle San Pedro, Calle Santa Rosalia, Via El Rosario, Via El Socorro, Via San Vicente and Via Santo Tomas. Of the 1.09 miles of street clipped to the boundary, 0.74 miles sit on the city's Private Roads layer and are maintained by the association. Zoning is Single-Family-4,000 across 29.8 acres with half an acre of Single-Family-7,000 at the edge, and the General Plan carries 22.5 acres as Medium High Density.

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, 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 puts 23.8 acres of the boundary in the Non-Wildland Fuel class and 7.0 acres in Moderate.

Las Brisas was built between 1970 and 1975, in the stretch when San Juan Capistrano stopped being a farm town and started being a suburb. The city was nine years old when the first of these homes went up. What it replaced was ranch and orchard land: after the cattle economy collapsed in the 1860s under flood, smallpox and a drought that killed the herds outright, the valley turned to diversified farming, and European immigrant families planted wheat, barley, walnuts and then citrus across the flats.

Joel Congdon's walnut groves, begun on the far side of Alipaz Street in the 1870s, were the start of an industry that stayed a staple of the Orange County economy until blight took the groves in the 1930s. Citrus outlasted the walnuts by fifty years. By 1990 the last growers were telling reporters that farming in the Capistrano Valley was over, and that the water and fertilizer cost ten times what it once had. Ground like this is what they sold.