Thriving City’s Alter Image Is Small Town Friendliness : Brea: Early oil town glides along on smooth blend of commercial and residential development and works at keeping its young people as residents.

To describe Brea is to tell a tale of two cities.

On one hand, it is a town of 33,000 residents who have community festivals, keep in touch with neighbors and cheer on the high school girls’ championship basketball team.

On the other hand, Brea is a thriving city that supports a work force of 100,000 during the weekdays, is home to Orange County’s second largest shopping mall and a growing number of corporate business parks and retail centers.

It is this blend of community spirit and commercial might that attracts home buyers to Brea and retains longtime residents.

“We definitely wanted to stay in Brea. I think this city is run with an eye to the future,” said Bob Holman, who moved across town into a new Laurel Creek Townhome last December with his wife, Elisabeth, and toddler daughter.

“We’ve got a good mix of retail, industrial and residential, and a good tax base. The city’s not going to have the kind of financial problems other cities might,” Holman said.

About 35% of Brea’s general fund budget is derived from sales tax revenue, “a significant amount for a city of our size,” said Larry Hurst, Brea’s finance director.

This kind of income has allowed the 10-square-mile city to foster cultural programs, keep its level of services high and infrastructure in top condition.

For entertainment, Brea residents can shop, visit the art gallery, take in a performance at the Civic & Cultural Center, see a movie or go to the Improv--the famous comedy club--now open at the Brea Marketplace, the city’s newest shopping center.

“Brea is unique in that it is a regional city with a community emphasis. The strategy of having a balanced community has served us well,” said City Manager Frank Benest.

The city’s latest effort to balance commerce and residential life is the downtown redevelopment project called “Brea By Design.” It is intended to put a new shine on the aging business district along Brea Boulevard and create more affordable housing in a city where the average price of a single-family home is $250,000.

Several small tracts of townhomes and condominiums are part of the redevelopment project, which will include a 22-acre retail center, restaurants, parks and pedestrian-oriented plazas and promenades.

While most of the residential sites in the redevelopment area are still on the drawing boards, among the first to open was the Laurel Creek Townhomes, at Birch Street and Laurel Avenue, where the Holmans live.

Laurel Creek is a small tract of 28 two- and three-bedroom townhomes which share one common wall, plus four detached, four-bedroom models. Some of the townhomes were sold under market value, starting at $186,000, through Brea’s Mortgage Assistance Program.

“It was the only way I could afford a place like this on my own,” said Patty Burns, owner of a 1,530-square-foot townhome. A pharmaceutical sales representative in her 30s, Burns is a “move-up” buyer who previously owned a small condominium in Brea.

Through the Mortgage Assistance Program, the city provides “silent seconds” of up to $50,000 to allow low- to moderate-income buyers to qualify for a loan. The buyer then makes payments on the balance and does not have to repay the second if the home is sold to another party who qualifies for mortgage assistance.

“I think the program is a way for the city to keep younger people and families in Brea,” Burns said. The median age of residents in the city is 34 years.

“It’s really a strong commitment on the part of the city council to encourage home ownership,” said Susan Georgino, Redevelopment Services director.

Elsewhere in the downtown area, smaller, 40-year-old homes can be bought for $165,000 to $170,000.

“Some of the young people don’t mind the older homes, because they’re quaint and they fix them up,” said Elizabeth Saddington, of Re/Max of North Orange County. “But a lot of the homes are not big enough for people with families. So we tell them about townhomes. That’s mainly what the first-time buyer is buying.”

“Brea isn’t inhospitable to first-time buyers, but being a small community, we don’t have the selection of price ranges that a larger city would have,” said Mike Stout, of Re/Max 5000.

What Brea does have is a selection of homes in the $250,000 and up range. About 85% of the housing units are single-family tract and custom homes.

Among the more established and pricey neighborhoods are Pleasant Hills, North Hills, Amber Hills, Eagle Hills and Olinda Village.

Pleasant Hills, north of Central Avenue and west of Puente Street, is a neighborhood of custom homes that sell for $400,000 and up. A few streets toward the Los Angeles County line is a community of tract homes called North Hills.

As the names imply, both of these neighborhoods are hilly. The lawns and street medians are impeccably landscaped, and many homes have been upgraded with room additions or new facades.

Adjacent to those communities is a tract of large homes called Amber Hills, built by Unocal Land and Development Co. in 1989. On weekends, children can be seen playing in this neighborhood, evidence that young families have settled here.

Eagle Hills is across town, east of Kraemer Boulevard and north of Birch, not far from the Birch Hills and Imperial golf courses. Here, ranch fences along the medians, carved wooden street signs and mining-town style street lights lend a rustic feel to this community.

The most visible and newest large tract of high-end homes in Brea is the one built three years ago by J. M. Peters--a cluster of peach stucco and red-tile-roofed homes north of the Brea Mall on the west side of the Orange (57) Freeway.

The J. M. Peters homes start in the $300,000s and range up toward $500,000. “Those executive homes have focused more attention on Brea, simply because people can see them from the freeway,” Stout said.

The term “exclusive” neighborhood rightly applies to only one part of Brea--Olinda Village. It is exclusive not only because there are a finite number of homes in the area--about 200--but also because they are situated in Carbon Canyon, a setting unlike any other in the city.

“There is no alternative to Olinda. It is not like the flat part of the city,” said Doug Dale, a broker at Carbon Creek Realty.

Olinda Village is located off Highway 143, Carbon Canyon Road, nestled amid the steep brush-covered Chino Hills. Here, the din of suburbia is distant and tall trees serve to further isolate the homes. Many have sweeping views of the canyon.

The village has a population of about 600, and Dale estimates that more than half the homeowners are original buyers. “People rarely move from here, and they know each other. In rural areas like this one, you still have the neighborhood concept.

“These days, all kinds of communities are called villages--like in Irvine. But you really can’t tell one from the other. This is truly a village. It is very rare to find in Southern California.”

Home prices are another thing that make Olinda Village exclusive: Tract models start in the upper $200,000s, but there are 20 custom homes on two-acre lots that run in the $800,000 to $1-million range.

“I’ve been here seven years, and it is heaven,” said Donna Hill, a resident and owner of Hidden Valley Ranch horse stables in Olinda Village. “It’s so peaceful. There’s no noise and no stress. It’s like the last frontier, with as much as Brea is changing.”

Olinda Village retained the name of the 1890s oil boom town of Olinda, a settlement of 15,000 people that originally was more populated than the town that became Brea. Union Oil Co. purchased 1,200 acres of land in Olinda from the Stearns ranching family and began drilling.

High wages lured workers to the oil fields, and they brought their families with them. The town was named Randolph, after an engineer on the Pacific Electric Railway, which extended from Los Angeles through the oil fields to Yorba Linda.

By 1911, the town of Randolph was renamed Brea, which means “tar” in Spanish. When drilling activity began to slow in Olinda, people began leaving and Brea started to prosper. It was incorporated a year later as Orange County’s eighth city, with a population of 732.

Today, Unocal and Shell Oil Co. still drill for oil in Brea Canyon and a few pumps are working in the northern part of the city, but oil production is a small part of Brea’s industry.

Up to the late 1960s and early 1970s, Brea was still a small, residential city. Betty Kaplan, 23-year resident originally from Commack, Long Island, New York, said, “Brea was very similar to Commack. It had a rural feel.

“All of Imperial Highway was empty and lined with orange groves and strawberry fields. There were only two street lights along Central Avenue. Brea Boulevard was a lovely place to shop,” Kaplan recalled.

Kaplan and her husband, Jerry, purchased their four-bedroom, single-story home on a one-third acre lot just south of Pleasant Hills in 1967 for $29,500. She estimates it is now worth about $265,000.

“Brea was, and is, a great place to raise kids,” said Betty Kaplan, who has two grown sons.

Public schools in Brea consistently score above the 90th percentile in state and national achievement tests, and $36 million was spent on constructing a new Brea-Olinda High School, which opened last September.

Sandra Ashwood and her fiance, Les McKenzie, recently bought a tri-level home on Kings Canyon Road. Originally from La Habra, Ashwood said what she likes best about Brea is that it is accessible to everything, and that it is a place with family values.

“A lot of people appear to be going out together as families. You don’t get that feeling in a lot of other cities.”

AT A GLANCE Population

1990: 32,873

1980-89 change: +17.8%

Median age: 34 years

Annual income

Per capita: 19,463

Median household: 51,157

Household distribution

Less than $20,000: 13.0%

$20,000 - $35,000: 16.7%

$35,000 - $50,000: 19%

$50,000 - $75,000: 30.8%

$75,000 + 20.5%