Estates at San Juan

Estates at San Juan covers 36.57 acres and the city's address layer records 63 addresses inside it, one for each numbered lot on the recorded map, spread across four named streets: Calle Los Elegantes, Calle Pinon, Camino La Ronda and Via Los Coyotes. All 0.89 miles of street inside the boundary appear on the city's Private Roads layer, so the association maintains them rather than the city. The whole boundary is zoned Planned Community District, 36.6 acres of it, and the General Plan carries the same ground as Very Low Density, the lightest residential designation the city applies. The terminus of the West La Ronda Trail sits inside the boundary along 0.15 miles of city trail.

Four interior points were tested against the Capistrano Unified locator and all four returned the same three campuses. Harold Ambuehl Elementary takes TK through fifth grade with 324 students at a 23 to 1 ratio, 53 percent meeting the state standard in English language arts and 59 percent in mathematics, and it feeds Marco Forster Middle, which enrolls 930. San Juan Hills High School enrolls 2,641 and graduated 96.2 percent of its class. All 36.6 acres of the boundary sit in the High fire hazard severity class.

These are large-lot homes on the eastern rise, built between 1989 and 1998, on hills that belonged for most of the nineteenth century to one man. Don Juan Forster bought the ruined mission with James McKinley at auction in 1845 for 710 dollars, then put together Rancho Trabuco, Rancho La Paz and Rancho Santa Margarita y Las Flores until he held more than 200,000 acres and was the largest landowner in California. The United States patented 46,432 acres to him in 1866.

Via los Coyotes, Camino La Ronda and Calle los Elegantes run through ground that by the 1880s grew barley, walnuts and oranges within the town limits. Estates like this one are what those hillsides became.