The neighborhood
The ground truth in 90720
The Rossmoor tract next door shares the 90720 ZIP and a good share of the moving work. It went up starting in 1957, single-story almost throughout, running from roughly 1,100 square feet to well over 5,000 after decades of additions, with pools, mature street trees and the red brick perimeter wall that keeps traffic out and leaves only a few ways in off Los Alamitos Boulevard and Seal Beach Boulevard. A wide ranch house is not a small move. Sixty years of garage, attic and side-yard storage has to come out through one front door and down one driveway, and the crew that plans for that finishes hours ahead of the crew that does not.
The other half of the job is access. Joint Forces Training Base takes up about 1,300 acres inside the city limits, running from Farquhar Avenue down to Lampson, and a move on or off it starts at the Lexington Drive gate with photo ID, a truck that may be searched and 25 mph enforced the whole way to the door. Off base, Katella Avenue is the one real spine across town, past the medical center and the race course, and it slows badly at the wrong hour, so we load early and stage the truck where it will not block a neighbour's driveway. Los Alamitos also sits minutes from the 605, the 405 and the 22, which is why a crew coming up from San Diego can be at your curb before the street is awake.
30th StreetUniversity AveRay StreetMorley FieldBalboa Park