Nearly twenty five years ago, the Mission Viejo Company bought a
10,000-acre section of Rancho Mission Viejo from the O'Neill family,
which once owned much of the land from Oceanside to El Toro. The
company would go on to create a master plan for a community,specifying the number of parks, homes, recreational activities and
retail spaces.
Early developers in the 1960s dismissed most of the land as simply "undevelopable". In
the
early 1970 surban planner Donald Bren, who would later become the
president of the Irvine Company, drafted a master plan which placed
roads in the valleys and houses on the hills, and contoured to the
geography of the area. The plan worked, and by 1980 much of the city
of Mission
Viejo was completed. During the late 1970s and the 1980s, houses in
Mission Viejo were in such high demand that housing tracts often sold
out before construction even began on them. The
houses and shopping centers in the city are
almost uniformly designed
in a Spanish mission style, with "adobe" like stucco walls
and barrel-tile roofs. Many point to Mission
Viejo as the first and largest manifestation of Donald Bren's obsession
with Spanish architecture, which would again become apparent with his
developments in Irvine and Newport Beach. Mission Viejo became a city
on March 31, 1988. As of the 2000 census, the city had a total population
of 93,102. It is one of Orange County's most outstanding cities. With
its amazing scenery and beautiful man-made lake, Mission Viejo is a
wonderful place to come and put your legs up and relax.
So come make a home in Mission Viejo, the southern Orange County
suburban city.