San Juan Mobile Estates

San Juan Mobile Estates covers 37.49 acres addressed off Alipaz Street, and the city's address layer records 323 addresses inside the boundary, 322 of them carrying a unit designator. That is the fourth largest address count of the fifty communities on the city's register, ahead of all but three of its homeowner associations. All 2.21 miles of road inside the boundary appear on the city's Private Roads layer, the eighth greatest street mileage on the register. Zoning is Mobile Home Park District across 37.4 acres and the General Plan carries 37.5 acres as Medium High Density.

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 16.6 acres of the boundary in Zone X, 14.2 acres in Zone AO and one acre in Zone AE, and the fire layer places all 37.5 acres in the Non-Wildland Fuel class. A tenth of a mile of city trail runs inside the boundary.

San Juan Mobile Estates is a mobile home park of 323 spaces on Alipaz Street, run by Bessire and Casenhiser Inc. rather than self managed, and it is part of a housing type this city carries far more of than the wider region does: the adopted Housing Element counts 1,394 mobile home units among the city's 12,558 total units, about 11 percent of the stock against 3.5 percent across the six county Southern California region. The whole of the park sits on portions of lots 60, 61 and 62 of Tract No. 103, the old subdivision that still supplies the legal description for ground along Del Obispo Street, Los Rios Street and Camino Capistrano.

The farm that defined this ground still stands a short way up the road. In 1868 Joel Rathbone Congdon, with his wife Mary and his brother-in-law J. P. Fuller, bought 160 acres bounded by Alipaz Road, Del Obispo and El Camino Real. The land kept farming through a chain of owners: a rancher named Maag from 1928 to 1946, George Cobren after him, and Sanji Kinoshita from 1955. The Kinoshita family lived in the Congdon house until 1975 and farmed the ground until 1990, when they sold it to the city. The 28.8 acres that survive are zoned permanent agricultural and farmed today by The Ecology Center; everything else along Alipaz, including this park, is what the rest of the 160 acres became.