Highland and Lakebed

Highland and Lakebed covers 764.2 acres and holds 1,290 addresses on 1,164 parcels, at a median lot of 0.409 acres. Zoning is dominated by 431.3 acres of Residential Estate, with 83.4 acres of Open Space, 54.2 acres Residential Urban and 18.9 acres Residential Suburban, and eleven categories in all. Sixty-eight named streets carry 15.8 miles of centerline, 105 segments of it private. The trail network is the largest in the city: 11.68 miles across forty-four segments, thirty-six attributed to the city's landscape and maintenance district and four to Orange County, with a horse crossing signal and twelve trail entry points marked along it.

The name records the water. The flood layer places 87.4 acres of the boundary in zone A, the state liquefaction layer covers 80.2 acres, and six parcels inside the boundary still carry the citation Yorba Reservoir on the city's own parcel record. Underneath, the Richfield oil field boundary covers the entire 764.2 acres and the city flags every one of the 1,290 addresses as sitting over it. Eighty-five wells remain on the state record here, all in Richfield, of which four are recorded active and eighteen idle. The city records 195 septic systems inside the boundary and flags 279 addresses as septic served.

The lakebed in the name is real, and the streets remember water that is no longer there: Lake Shore Lane, Lakehaven Way, Lakeview Avenue and Vista del Lago all sit on the flat, while Highland Avenue, Highland Court, Longview Drive, Lookout Drive and Scenic View Drive climb the ridge above it. All 764 acres of the community lie inside the state's Richfield oil field, and Richfield Road and Richfield Place carry the same name.

Oil here is not only history. The city publishes 85 wells inside the boundary, 63 of them plugged, 18 idle and four still active, with REDU the largest single lease. At the same time 279 homes are on septic systems and the median lot runs above four tenths of an acre, so the grove and ranch lot pattern from the citrus decades survived subdivision here. The first lemon and orange groves were planted in 1910 and the Yorba Linda Citrus Association formed in 1912; Plum Tree Lane, Blueberry Street, Peppergrove Street, Nutmeg Lane, Magnolia Avenue, Mariposa Avenue and Flora Drive keep the orchard vocabulary.