San Juan Hills Estates

San Juan Hills Estates covers 148.33 acres, the sixth largest of the fifty communities on the city's homeowner association register, and the address layer records 258 addresses inside it across thirteen named streets, from Avenida Madrid and Avenida Terramar through Calle Bolero, Camino Dimora and Via Del Sereno. Every one of the 3.6 miles of street inside the boundary appears on the city's Private Roads layer, the fourth greatest street mileage on the register and all of it maintained by the association. The whole boundary is zoned Planned Community District, and the General Plan divides the ground between 57.5 acres of Medium Low Density, 51.7 acres of General Open Space, 25.0 acres of Low Density and 12.6 acres of Natural Open Space.

A third of a mile of city trail runs inside the boundary, the city's 200 foot ridgeline buffer crosses 1.93 acres, and the Zone 2 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 148.3 acres of the boundary sit in the High fire hazard severity class.

San Juan Hills Estates covers a large piece of the hills south-east of the old town, built out between 1996 and 2011 on streets named Avenida Terramar, Calle Mira Monte, Avenida Placida and Calle Bolero. It went up under rules the city wrote specifically to make sure new building did not look like everywhere else.

Those rules came from 1974, when San Juan Capistrano adopted a general plan built around preserving historic resources and limiting density. The town had incorporated only thirteen years earlier, on 19 April 1961, and had watched what happened to the rest of Orange County. The result is the Spanish naming, the tile roofs and the protected ridgelines you can see from any of these streets.