Capistrano Villas #3

Capistrano Villas #3 covers 25.94 acres and holds 387 addresses, the third most of the fifty communities on the city's homeowner association register, and 488 parcels, the second most. The address layer names six streets inside the boundary, Avenida De La Vista, Calle La Purisima, Calle Santa Barbara, La Zanja Street, Los Rios Street and Paseo Santa Clara, and none of the 1.08 miles of street inside it appears on the city's Private Roads layer, so the city maintains all of it along with the alleys the recorded maps laid out. Zoning is Multiple-Family District across 25.5 acres with 0.4 acres in the Specific Plan and Precise Plan District at the edge.

Four interior points were tested against the Capistrano Unified locator and all four returned the same three campuses. Kinoshita Elementary takes TK through fifth grade with 302 students at a 22 to 1 ratio and feeds 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 divides the boundary between 12.8 acres of Moderate hazard, 12.1 acres of Non-Wildland Fuel and one acre of High.

Two of the streets inside this association are Los Rios Street and La Zanja Street, and both are older than almost anything else in California suburbia. Los Rios is the oldest continuously occupied residential neighborhood in the state, because San Juan Capistrano was the first of the twenty-one missions to let Native Americans, soldiers and workers live outside the mission grounds. La Zanja is the ditch, the Spanish word for the water channel that fed the mission; three aqueducts once carried water through its courtyards to cisterns for drinking, cooking and washing.

The condominiums here were built from 1973 onward on the low ground beside the creek, in the decade when the last of the town's farmland went to housing. Their address is ordinary. Their location is not: this is the block where California's continuous residential history actually begins.