Small community shopping (Long Beach, Irvine, Orange: mover, neighborhood, pharmacy)

[ocmover]

Hello,

Thinking about moving from the UK to Irvine or surrounding areas with wife + baby with a fairly well paid job.

Are there many communities in Orange County that are focussed around a local set of shops (grocer, butcher, baker, pharmacy etc...) or is everything focussed around the larger malls and superstores?

Which areas are good for those types of families wanting things to do during the day for both the baby/toddler and the mothers sanity (courses, language classes, yoga etc...)?

Thanks for all your experiences and thoughts.

- OCmover

[Mr. Fantastic]

Laguna Beach and Dana Point may be more your pace if you're looking for smaller, independent, shops.

Irvine is mostly isolated shopping areas full of big corporate chains.

[ocmover]

Thanks for the advice MrF - I will have a look at these.

[bhcompy]

There are a great deal of areas like this, including many small areas of larger cities. The older parts of the county have more of this as they have a lot of local tradition and established business, but it's not non-existent in newer areas or more suburban areas, even Irvine.

Anyways, I work in Irvine and live in Los Alamitos. Los Al and neighboring Seal Beach pretty much suit your needs if you want to look at an area that will be drastically different than Dana Point or Laguna Beach(and probably decidedly cheaper). Some areas have been forcibly redeveloped by the business land owners(losing The Parasol, Champs, and a few other local institutions), but there's a popular local butcher(Brees Meats), a couple of small neighborhood pharmacies, a real good pasty shop(or so my British friends say), and a lot of other local business institutions in both cities. The cities share parks and rec resources and there are plenty of activities for mothers(yoga, aikido, dance, etc) as well as "mommy and me" activities on top of it. Helps having a great family beach in Seal Beach in city as well as being very close to Mother's Beach in Long Beach on top of that.

Worth a look and probably not much different commute wise than Dana Point(disregarding the toll road)