Mariners Village

Mariners Village covers 28.89 acres and the city's address layer records 201 addresses inside it, the twelfth most of the fifty communities on the city's register, on sixteen named streets that keep to one idea from end to end: Buccaneer, Commodore, Dolphin, Driftwood, Halfmoon, Lighthouse, Outrigger, Regatta, Sandpiper, Sea Breeze, Southwind, Surfrider, Terrapin and Tradewind courts, all off Mariner Drive, with Via La Pluma at the edge. The county puts the median parcel at 0.034 acres, the smallest of the fifty, which is the footprint the recorded maps drew when they fitted 151 lots into two adjoining tracts of about ten acres each. Of the 1.11 miles of street inside the boundary, 0.67 miles are private and the rest is city maintained, and the whole boundary is zoned Planned Residential Development District.

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 federal flood layer places 15.9 acres of the boundary in Zone X and 1.7 acres in Zone AO, and the fire layer places all 28.9 acres in the Non-Wildland Fuel class.

Buccaneer, Commodore, Dolphin, Driftwood, Halfmoon, Lighthouse. Westport Home Builders, Inc. recorded the two tracts behind those streets in the autumn of 1974, Tract No. 8593 on September 19 and Tract No. 8594 on November 6, fitting 151 lots into two adjoining tracts of about ten acres each. The houses went up between 1975 and 1979, four to eight years after Dana Point Harbor was dedicated on 31 July 1971, and the streets were named after the sea because that was the thing that had just changed about this part of the coast.

For most of the nineteenth century the water below was a working anchorage rather than a marina. Richard Henry Dana Jr. saw it in 1835 and called it the only romantic spot on the coast, and through the 1830s and 1840s it was where hides from Mission San Juan Capistrano went out to the ships, which is how an inland mission traded with Boston. Building the harbor in 1966 destroyed Killer Dana, the surf break that ran out of deep water onto the rocks below the headland.