Identity Crisis Boon to Home Buyers : El Toro: Compared to other Orange County areas, this community’s prices are lower. Move is under way to incorporate this one-time Spanish land grant.

Kevin and Julie Ansel of Huntington Beach felt it was now or never, back in December, 1988.

With home prices in Orange County rising virtually every time they opened a newspaper, they felt if they didn’t leave their Huntington Beach rental and buy a home, they would be locked out of the market forever.

The Ansels were reluctant to give up living near the beach, but coastal prices were out of their range. After considering Rancho Santa Margarita, Irvine and Laguna Niguel, the Ansels discovered their condominium in El Toro. It was a happy compromise.

“The big attraction was the price and the central location,” said Kevin Ansel a systems consultant with Century Micro Products in Laguna Hills. They paid $118,000 for a 4-year-old condominium in the White Oak development.

What they got was a 1,000-square-foot condominium with two bedrooms and two baths in a pleasant neighborhood east of Trabuco Road.

“We feel like we got a great deal. We’re close to work, to our families and to everything we enjoy doing,” said Julie Ansel, a student teacher with the Saddleback Unified School District. “We love the view of Saddleback Mountain and we even get ocean breezes.”

The Ansels are typical of El Toro’s residents: They are young, white and professional. And like most other residents interviewed, the Ansels found El Toro’s location near the geographical center of Orange County appealing.

Situated in the Saddleback Valley in the rolling foothills of the Santiago and Modjeska peaks, and bounded by the San Diego Freeway on the west, Trabuco Canyon on the east, Irvine and the El Toro Marine Base on the north and Mission Viejo on the south, El Toro is currently part of unincorporated Orange County.

Cityhood, however, may loom on the horizon. The El Toro-based Community Coalition for Incorporation wants voters to approve the creation of a 21-square-mile city composed of El Toro, Lake Forest, Portola Hills and the yet-to-be-built Foothill Ranch.

Increased police protection, controlling growth and improving community parks are reasons residents cite for the drive for cityhood.

Penny King, a math student and 10-year resident of El Toro, thinks that city government may be better able to tackle issues that have risen from the area’s rapid growth. “My daughter is bused to Mission Viejo even though there are two elementary schools in our neighborhood, it’s very frustrating.”

Municipal fever has not spread to every neighborhood in the proposed city of El Toro. Residents say the 1,000-acre Portola Hills neighborhood of 976 homes, townhouses and condominiums at the junction of El Toro and Santiago Canyon roads should be left to follow its own destiny, even to become a separate city one day. A plan to exclude the semi-isolated community from the cityhood proposal could postpone a hoped-for November ballot measure until next year.

According to Steve Price of Lakeview Realty, El Toro is a wonderful opportunity for home shoppers with tight budgets.

“With the ceiling for FHA loans raised to $124,000, buyers have a good chance of finding a one- or two-bedroom condominium that qualifies for the financing.”

“One-bedroom condominiums can start as low as $90,000,” Price said. “Of course, that’s without a garage.”

Single-family homes start as low as $180,000, with the median price hovering around $240,000. “You can get a lot of house for under $200,000,” Price said.

Despite El Toro’s increasing popularity with first-time buyers like the Ansels, it still suffers from an identity problem.

“Most people automatically associate El Toro with the Marine base, when actually the community has been here a lot longer,” said Jenny Meister of Pridemark Real Estate in Irvine. “And driving through the area, it’s usually lumped in with Mission Viejo or Laguna Hills.”

El Toro’s identity crisis can be a boon for home buyers, though.

“El Toro is a sleeper,” Meister said. “It’s not well-known, so you get more home for your money. Compared to Irvine, in El Toro you could get one more bedroom or a garage instead of a carport for the same price.”

Woody Jones, who bought a home in the Lake Forest Classics development in December, feels as if he had gotten a newer, better-quality home than he might have elsewhere.

“In Costa Mesa, and even in Mission Viejo, the houses in our price range were considerably older and in need of more remodeling work; our place is almost brand-new,” said Jones, an agent with Farmers Insurance in Irvine.

Jones paid $247,000 for his 3-year-old, three-bedroom Lake Forest Classics home, built by Fieldstone Development.

While El Toro Marine Base makes its presence known regularly with helicopters and other aircraft, El Toro, the community, has maintained a rather low profile despite a colorful past and nearly a quarter-century of rapid development.

According to Bud Conn, a ranger at Heritage Hill Historical Park, the community’s history can be traced back to the early 1840s and Don Jose Serrano, whose father, Don Francisco Serrano, was a member of the Portola expedition.

A Spanish land grant to the Serranos was named Rancho Canada de los Alisos (Canyon of the Sycamores) and stretched from Trabuco Canyon to the San Diego Freeway, and from El Toro Road up to the El Toro Marine Base--nearly 11,000 acres.

A hint of the beauty the early settlers found in El Toro is revealed in the view from the Serrano adobe, the only structure from the original rancho still standing, which is preserved within the Heritage Hill Historical Park.

Looking east, past Aliso Creek and beyond houses and condominiums to the Plano Trabuco and Saddleback Mountain, it is easy to imagine the view Don Jose had when surveying his vast rancho.

The three-acre Heritage Hill Park, tucked unceremoniously behind a shopping center at the intersection of Serrano Road and Lake Forest Drive, also displays the Harvey Bennett house, the last turn-of-the-century wood-frame house in El Toro; St. George’s Mission of the Episcopal Church, the first community church, and the 100-year-old El Toro Grammar School.

But El Toro’s fickle water supply, meager at best, and depleted by a series of droughts, forced Don Jose to divide the ranch and to mortgage several sections. Dwight Whiting bought Rancho Canada de los Alisos, with the exception of 700 acres acquired by the McFadden brothers.

Born in Boston, Whiting had traveled extensively throughout the world before deciding, for health reasons, to make his home in the Saddleback Valley and start a community for gentlemen fruit farmers.

Whiting went to England in 1889, where he widely circulated a prospectus about his proposed new farming town. As a result, a number of English families accompanied him back to California and El Toro.

“They built some beautiful Victorian homes here,” Conn said. “It’s too bad we couldn’t have saved them from being torn down.”

Whiting named the original town “Aliso City” but was denied a post office permit because of the similarity to Alviso, a small town in Santa Clara County near San Jose. El Toro, the area’s name since Mexican days, was substituted instead. Where exactly the name El Toro came from in the first place depends on who you ask.

One version is that Indian ranch hands named it after bellowing bulls in the herd of longhorn cattle kept by Don Jose. Another version attributes the name to a charging bull that was turned aside from a padre who stood in its path praying for divine protection. And a third story describes a friendly bull that frequented the neighborhood and became so famous that the area was named Rancho El Toro.

Development picked up after World War II, helped by completion of the San Diego Freeway through San Juan Capistrano in 1959. Unfortunately, what was considered progress in the ‘60s and ‘70s has become congestion in the ‘80s and ‘90s.

With the growth of the area east of El Toro, particularly Rancho Santa Margarita and Coto de Caza, and the Irvine Spectrum business park to the north, traffic is a particular sore point with El Toro residents.

“The traffic can be a nightmare,” Meister said. She notes that the El Toro “Y,” the intersection of the 5 and 405 freeways, is particularly bad during the evening rush hour.

“With the new communities like Rancho Santa Margarita building like crazy to the east, the area is simply growing too fast, but obviously, this isn’t a problem unique to El Toro,” she said.

Residents are hopeful that the Foothill Corridor, a proposed toll road planned for the eastern edge of El Toro, will help ease the congestion.

A regional transportation center with bus and train depots to be located in the Spectrum is also in the planning stages.

Surprisingly, residents have relatively few complaints about the air traffic from the Marine base.

“Frankly, it’s not nearly as noisy as I had expected,” said Julie Ansel. “Although the occasional helicopter can really drown out a phone conversation.”

Despite these difficulties, residents generally speak highly of their community.

Kevin Ansel, an avid cyclist, notes that El Toro is just eight miles from Laguna Beach, and there is “great access” to Santiago Canyon trails and the Aliso Creek bike trail.

“It’s a nice, safe neighborhood and there is an awful lot of parental participation in the schools,” said Martha Burgoon, a 17-year resident of the Lake Forest area and manager of Lakeview Real Estate Co.

Lake Forest, just north of “old” El Toro is centered on two man-made lakes and an appealing “woods” area set in a grove of eucalyptuses planted to produce wood for railroad ties.

According to Burgoon, Lake Forest features the area’s most expensive housing, with lake-front properties climbing to $500,000. One home for sale recently, with a view of the lake and three bedrooms in 1,850 square feet, was priced at $309,000.

“A good deal,” Burgoon said. “And you can sit out in your back yard and watch the Blue Angels.” One weekend a year, the Blue Angels, the Navy’s precision flying team, perform their daredevil maneuvers in the skies over the base.

At A Glance

Population

1990 Estimate: 54,945

1980-90 Change: 128.6%

Median age: 32.7 years

Annual Income

Per capita: 16,063

Median household: 44,695

Household distributions

Less than $15,000: 9.2%

$15,000 - $30,000: 18.7%

$30,000 - $50,000: 30.3%

$50,000 - $75,000: 28.3%

$75,000 +: 13.5%