southern Orange County

[freepcrusher]

looking at a topographic map of southern California - there probably used to be a lot of open areas to build homes in such as in the LA Basin (running from Santa Monica all the way to Irvine) and in the Valleys to the north of that from Chatsworth to San Bernardino. In those areas it is pretty much all flat and relatively easy to build homes. In Orange County though, anything east of Irvine, it sounds like it would really be a pain in the ass to build homes in.

so the question I have is - why did developers want to start building homes in the 70s and 80s in that part of the county, when it seems to me that it would be harder to build homes there and there wouldn't be demand there like there would be in the LA Basin (Torrance, Anaheim etc).

[Torie]

One of the first tracts down in what is now Laguna Niguel, was built in the 1970's as housing for workers for the huge new Rockwell plant being built, to fabricate cathode tubes. But then the transistor was invented, and the plant was never used, and was left empty, until the government bought it to store IRS and other records, now known as the Chet Holifield building, aka the "Ziggurat."

The beauty of the place, with its hills, and the generation of high income jobs in the Irvine-Newport Beach area, then generated the construction of higher income housing starting in the 1980's, along with the flat areas in north Orange County by the end of the 1980's having been largely built out.