Ocean Pointe

Ocean Pointe covers 96.64 acres, the eighth largest of the fifty communities on the city's homeowner association register, and only 80 addresses sit on it. Nearly two thirds of the ground is not buildable: the zoning layer carries 61.4 acres as General Open Space against 29.3 acres of Single-Family-10,000 and 5.7 acres of Single-Family-20,000, the General Plan carries 48.8 acres as General Open Space, and the city's 200 foot ridgeline buffer crosses 23.02 acres. The seven named streets are Camino Las Ramblas, Kinkerry Lane, Las Brisas Del Mar, Las Palmas Del Mar, Montanas Del Mar, Oceana Del Mar and Pacifica Del Mar, and of the 1.21 miles of street inside the boundary 0.6 miles are private and the rest is public.

Four interior points were tested against the Capistrano Unified locator and all four returned the same three campuses, and the middle school is not the one most of the city attends. Palisades Elementary takes TK through fifth grade with 332 students, 58 percent meeting the state standard in English language arts and 57 percent in mathematics, and it feeds Shorecliffs Middle School in San Clemente, which enrolls 634. San Juan Hills High School enrolls 2,641 and graduated 96.2 percent of its class. The Fire Hazard Severity Zone layer places 74.3 acres of the boundary in the Very High class and 22.3 acres in High, so defensible space and construction requirements apply across the whole of it.

Ocean Pointe was built in 1996 and 1997 on the coastal hills above Camino las Ramblas, below the Connemara neighborhood. Its streets say what the buyer was paying for: Oceana del Mar, Montanas del Mar, Las Brisas del Mar, Las Palmas del Mar.

This is the seaward end of Rancho Boca de la Playa, the 6,607 acre grant that Governor Pio Pico made in 1846 to Emigdio Vejar and the most southerly Mexican land grant in Orange County. Its name means the mouth of the beach, for the estuary where San Juan Creek reaches the sea, and it ran from that creek south along the coast into what is now San Clemente. Vejar sold it in 1860 to Juan Avila, it passed through Pablo Pryor to Marcus A. Forster, and the United States did not patent the grant to Vejar until 1879.