Mission Hills Ranch

Mission Hills Ranch covers 56.76 acres, the fourteenth largest boundary on the city's homeowner association register, and only 60 addresses sit on it. The six streets the address layer names inside it read like the ranch the tract was cut from: Branding Iron Road, Canyon Crest Road, Lariat Circle, Mission Hills Drive, Outpost Road and Silver Spur Road. None of the 1.01 miles of street inside the boundary is on the city's Private Roads layer, because the 1967 map dedicated all of them to the public. Nearly a third of the ground is held open, 17.2 acres carried as General Open Space in both the zoning and the General Plan layers, with 39.5 acres zoned Single-Family-20,000, and the city's 200 foot ridgeline buffer crosses 8.34 acres.

The boundary takes in 0.56 miles of city trail with the terminus of the Highland Trail inside it, and the Mission Hills Pump Station sits inside it on city record. Four interior points were tested against the Capistrano Unified locator and all four returned the same three campuses: Harold Ambuehl Elementary for TK through fifth grade with 324 students, Marco Forster Middle at 930, and San Juan Hills High School at 2,641, which graduated 96.2 percent of its class. All 56.8 acres of the boundary sit in the High fire hazard severity class.

The street names give this one away: Branding Iron Road, Lariat Circle, Silver Spur Road, Outpost Road. Mission Hills Ranch was built in the late 1960s, before the city had a general plan worth the name, on the hills north of the old town, and it was sold on the idea that people would keep horses. Sixty houses sit on half-acre lots up there.

That was not a fantasy. San Juan Capistrano grew out of the rancho system after the mission was founded in 1776, with vaqueros, cattle and open grazing shaping the economy for a century, and the town has kept equestrian zoning, public riding trails and open space long after the rest of the county paved over its own. The city's general plan still defines a feeder trail as a dead end trail serving an equestrian zoned neighborhood, maintained by the homeowners association beside it.