Drive the 71 Freeway south from Pomona, past the last fold of the hills, and the Inland Empire softens into something quieter. The Koreans in Chino Hills, California, found that quiet on purpose. They came for the schools, the cul-de-sacs, the sense that a child could grow up here with a piano lesson and a soccer game and a Sunday in the choir loft, all within a ten-minute drive. This is a city of 78,000 where two of every five residents are Asian, and where nearly nine percent are Korean, more than double the California average.
The Place
Chino Hills sits in the far southwestern corner of San Bernardino County, pressed up against Los Angeles and Orange counties at once. It borders Diamond Bar, Brea, Yorba Linda and Pomona, and it spans roughly 45 square miles of rolling terrain at an average elevation of 860 feet.
The city was incorporated late, on 1 December 1991, with a population already near 42,000. By the 2020 census it had grown to 78,411. There is almost no old downtown here, because there was almost no old town. The place was planned.
What it has instead is space, top-ranked public schools, and a position that lets a family commute to either basin. For Korean professionals who wanted the suburb without the price of coastal Orange County, that combination was the whole argument.
How It Became Korean
The hills before the houses
For most of its history this was ranch land. In 1841 the area formed part of Rancho Santa Ana del Chino, a Mexican land grant to Antonio Maria Lugo, and for more than a century it stayed pasture and dairy country on the edge of the Pomona Valley. During Prohibition its isolation made it a quiet haunt for bootleggers.
The change came in 1979, when San Bernardino County adopted the Chino Hills Specific Plan, a blueprint to develop some 18,000 acres of these hills into housing. Through the 1980s the tract maps filled in fast. The homes were new, large and ordered, and they arrived just as a generation of Korean immigrants was looking to leave the apartments of Koreatown for a lawn.
Incorporation followed in December 1991, an act of self-government by residents who wanted to control the pace and the character of the building. The young city would spend the next two decades adding subdivisions, parks and, eventually, the people who would make a quarter of it Korean, Chinese and Indian.
Out of Koreatown, over the hills
The first wave of Korean Americans in Southern California had concentrated in Los Angeles after the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act lifted the old national-origin quotas. They built Koreatown in Los Angeles into the densest Korean enclave in the country, a grid of churches, hagwon tutoring centres and barbecue houses west of downtown.
But Koreatown was a first stop, not a destination. As families established small businesses and saved, they followed the classic American suburban arc outward. Some went south to Cerritos and Fullerton. Others pushed east into the San Gabriel Valley and the western Inland Empire.
The school-district migration
Chino Hills offered what those families were searching for, and it offered it new. The Chino Valley Unified School District runs the city’s schools, and its Chino Hills campuses post test scores well above the state average. Ruben S. Ayala High School, where roughly four in ten students are Asian, ranks in the top tier of California public high schools, with reading and maths proficiency far outpacing the state.
For Korean parents raised on the idea that education is the family’s central project, a district like that was not a feature. It was the reason. Realtors learned to lead with the school boundaries, and word travelled through congregations and kin from one closing to the next.
The neighbouring magnets
Chino Hills did not fill in isolation. Just across the county line sits Diamond Bar, an older and equally Korean-favoured suburb, and the two cities effectively share a commercial spine. The H Mart at the foot of Diamond Bar Boulevard became the pantry for both.
To the west lay the established Korean districts of the San Gabriel Valley. To the south, Orange County’s Korean centres. Chino Hills landed in the middle of all of it, close enough to belong to the network and cheap enough, by Southern California standards, to draw the families priced out elsewhere.
Churches as the social spine
If schools drew Korean families to Chino Hills, churches held them together once they arrived. Korean American suburban life organises itself around the congregation, and the area’s Presbyterian, Methodist and evangelical Korean churches became the places where new arrivals found a realtor, a tutor, a babysitter and a community in a single Sunday.
Congregations such as Korean Good Shepherd Presbyterian Church and the Grace Hill Korean Church, which serves Diamond Bar, Walnut and Chino Hills together, knit the dispersed houses into something that felt like a neighbourhood, even when the houses sat a freeway apart.
The Landmarks
The Shoppes at Chino Hills, 13920 City Center Drive. This open-air centre on Grand Avenue at Peyton Drive opened in May 2008 with Trader Joe’s, Barnes & Noble and a main-street layout of more than 70 shops. It is the social living room of the city, and on a weekend evening the Korean families strolling its pavements are as much a fixture as the fountains.
Super H Mart, 2825 S Diamond Bar Boulevard, Diamond Bar. Just over the line, this is the closest full Korean supermarket and the de facto grocery for Chino Hills Koreans. Inside its plaza sit Tous Les Jours bakery, Deli Manjoo and a food court turning out jjajangmyeon, kimbap and tteokbokki to crowds at lunch.
Ruben S. Ayala High School, 14255 Peyton Drive. Named for the longtime state senator, Ayala is the academic anchor that helped pull Korean families to this side of the hills. Its student body is roughly 41 percent Asian, and its rankings are the kind parents quote to one another at church.
Chino Hills High School, 16150 Pomona Rincon Road. The city’s other comprehensive high school, and another reason the school-district map and the real-estate map line up so neatly here. Between Ayala and Chino Hills High, the public schools carry the prestige that elsewhere would require private tuition.
Chino Hills State Park. More than 14,000 acres of grassland and oak woodland on the city’s edge, threaded with some 60 miles of trail. For families who left dense Koreatown for room to breathe, the park is the literal embodiment of why they moved east.
Grace Hill Korean Church (LA 은혜의동산 한인 교회). One of the congregations serving the Diamond Bar, Walnut and Chino Hills triangle, it is typical of the churches that double as the social infrastructure of suburban Korean life, from Korean-school classes for the children to the after-service meals that keep the diaspora’s food alive.
K-Food Town, Chino Hills. A newer Korean grocery that opened inside the city itself, a small sign that the community has grown dense enough to support its own shelves of banchan and ramyeon without the drive to Diamond Bar.
Where They Came From
The Koreans of Chino Hills are, overwhelmingly, a post-1965 immigration story, with roots in South Korea’s cities. Many trace their families to Seoul and the Gyeonggi region surrounding it, the urban heart from which most of America’s Korean immigration has flowed since the quotas fell.
The chain ran through Los Angeles. Few families came to Chino Hills directly from Korea. They arrived first in Koreatown or in the older Korean suburbs, built a business or a profession, and then moved outward when children and savings made a suburb possible.
That two-step migration explains the character of the community: not immigrants fresh off the plane, but established Korean American households, often with American-raised children, choosing Chino Hills as the place to consolidate a life already begun in California.
Chino Hills Today
Chino Hills today is one of the more comfortably multi-Asian suburbs in Southern California. The Korean families share the schools and shopping centres with large Chinese and Indian communities, and the city wears that mix easily. It is worth being precise: the Chinese and Indian communities of Chino Hills are their own distinct stories, and the Korean thread runs alongside them rather than blending in.
There is no Korean main street here, no signposted enclave. The community is dispersed across cul-de-sacs and held together by the church directory and the school calendar, with the commercial heart partly outsourced to the H Mart plaza in neighbouring Diamond Bar. It is suburban Korean America in its most diffuse, most arrived form.
The community keeps growing, too, and quietly maturing in place. The arrival of an in-city Korean grocery, the steady weekend traffic of families at the Shoppes, the second generation now raising children of its own in the same school district: these are the marks of a diaspora that has stopped being in transit and settled.
What it offers is exactly what it was built to offer: ranked schools, quiet streets, and a short drive to everything Korean the wider region holds. For a community that spent a generation working its way out of the city, that was always the point.
Frequently Asked Questions
How large is the Korean community in Chino Hills?
Korean residents make up roughly 8.8 percent of Chino Hills, more than double the California average of around 4.3 percent. Within the city’s Asian population, which is about 41 percent of all residents, Koreans are one of the three largest groups alongside Chinese and Indian Americans.
Why did Koreans move to Chino Hills, California?
The Koreans in Chino Hills came chiefly for the schools and the suburban space, moving out from Koreatown in Los Angeles and the older Korean suburbs as families established businesses and savings. Top-ranked Chino Valley Unified campuses and relatively affordable large homes made the city a natural eastward step.
Where do Korean residents of Chino Hills shop for groceries?
The main Korean supermarket is the Super H Mart at 2825 S Diamond Bar Boulevard in neighbouring Diamond Bar, with its bakery, food court and Korean pantry staples. A newer in-city option, K-Food Town, has opened within Chino Hills itself.
What schools draw Korean families to Chino Hills?
Ruben S. Ayala High School and Chino Hills High School, both in the Chino Valley Unified School District, are the academic magnets. Ayala in particular ranks among the stronger public high schools in California, with a student body that is roughly 41 percent Asian.
How is the Korean community of Chino Hills different from Diamond Bar?
Diamond Bar is the older, slightly more established Korean suburb across the Los Angeles County line, while Chino Hills is the newer, larger-housed neighbour in San Bernardino County. In practice the two cities share churches, the H Mart plaza and a single Korean social network spanning the county border.
Is there a Korean enclave or main street in Chino Hills?
No. The Koreans in Chino Hills are dispersed across suburban neighbourhoods rather than concentrated in a single district. The community is organised through Korean churches and school networks, with its commercial centre largely in the adjacent Diamond Bar H Mart plaza.
If your family’s story passed through Chino Hills, or any of the places Koreans have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From the apartments of Seoul and the storefronts of Koreatown, to a cul-de-sac in the Chino Hills with a top-ranked school down the road, to wherever you are now.