Village San Juan

Village San Juan covers 97.6 acres, the seventh largest boundary on the city's homeowner association register, and it holds 699 addresses and 756 parcels, more of each than any other community the city carries. Those homes sit on 38 named streets, from Applewood Court and Arbor Road through Smoketree Lane and Woodlake Court, and on 4.48 miles of street, the second greatest mileage on the register, of which 3.81 miles are on the city's Private Roads layer and the rest is public. The whole boundary is zoned Planned Community District, 97.4 acres of it, and the General Plan carries 78.9 acres as Medium High Density. The Rosenbaum Well Site No. 2 sits inside the boundary on city record.

Village San Juan is the only community on the city's register where all three assigned campuses lie outside San Juan Capistrano. Four interior points were tested against the Capistrano Unified locator and all four returned Viejo Elementary, Fred Newhart Middle School and Capistrano Valley High School, every one of them in Mission Viejo. Viejo Elementary enrolls 447 with 52 percent meeting the state standard in English language arts and 50 percent in mathematics, Newhart Middle enrolls 1,105 at 75 percent and 66 percent, and Capistrano Valley High enrolls 1,991 and graduated 95.9 percent of its class. The Fire Hazard Severity Zone layer places 92.5 acres of the boundary in the High class and 5.1 acres in Moderate.

Village San Juan holds close to seven hundred homes on ninety-seven acres, more than any other community the city maps, and was built from 1972 onward. Its streets are trees: Applewood, Arbor, Aspen, Avocado, Bay Tree, Briarwood. In a town that lived off orchards for a century, that is either a tribute or an epitaph.

The orchards were real. After drought, smallpox and a state property tax broke up the ranchos, the valley turned to barley, and then to the English walnuts Joel Congdon planted here in 1870, the first commercial grove in what became Orange County, which stayed one of the valley's main crops until the groves were pulled out for orange trees in the late 1930s. Citrus followed, and San Juan ran its own orange processing and produce packing plant near the railroad. The railroad had arrived in 1887 and given growers access to markets.