Getting to Know Cerritos
How Cerritos Sits
Cerritos is an independent, master-planned city in the southeast corner of Los Angeles County, on the border with Orange County, about 17 miles southeast of downtown Los Angeles. It covers roughly 8.7 square miles and holds close to 50,000 residents. That makes it one of the lower-density cities in this part of the county. Because it is its own city, Cerritos sets its own rules on truck parking, oversized vehicles, and permits, separate from the City of Los Angeles. The 91, 605, and 5 freeways frame the city. Cerritos borders Artesia and Hawaiian Gardens to the north and east, Norwalk to the northeast, Lakewood to the northwest, and Long Beach to the west. To the south lie the Orange County cities of Cypress and La Palma.
The city is known for its careful planning. Wide landscaped streets, generous parks, and large single-family homes define most neighborhoods, and housing here is overwhelmingly owner-occupied, with comparatively few apartments. Cerritos is one of the most established Asian-American communities in Southern California. It has a majority Asian population and a notably high rate of long-term homeownership. Its commercial landmarks, the Los Cerritos Center mall and the Cerritos Auto Square, are among the largest of their kind in the region, and the city is widely recognized for its strong public schools.
From Dairy Valley to Cerritos
The land was home to the Tongva people for thousands of years, then became part of Rancho Los Cerritos, the Spanish and Mexican land grant whose name, meaning “little hills,” the city later took. For the first half of the twentieth century, this was farm country, and by the 1950s, it held one of the densest concentrations of dairies in the country.
When neighboring cities began banning feed lots, the local dairy farmers incorporated their own city in 1956 to protect their livelihood, naming it Dairy Valley. At incorporation, the city counted more than 400 dairies and far more cows than people. As land values climbed in the 1960s, farming gave way to housing, and residents voted to allow large planned developments. In 1967, the city renamed itself Cerritos and set out to build the master-planned community it is today, trading dairies for landscaped neighborhoods, parks, schools, and the commercial centers that now anchor it. That deliberate reinvention is exactly why a Cerritos move tends to be defined by spacious, well-kept homes.
What a Cerritos Move Really Involves
Cerritos runs its own affairs, so the rules that shape a move come from the city, not from Los Angeles. For larger moves, the city grants temporary no-parking permits that reserve curb space at the address, set up and posted in advance. On Cerritos’s wide residential streets, there is usually ample room at the curb. Reserving the space still keeps a large truck directly at the door.
The homes are the local factor that sets a Cerritos move apart. Many are larger single-family houses that have been lived in for years. That means more rooms, more furniture, and more to pack and protect than a smaller home. We plan crew size and truck space around the full volume rather than the floor plan alone. The planned developments and gated communities add their own steps, such as shared access, gate clearance, and certificate-of-insurance rules through the association. We arrange all of that before the day.
The freeways framing the city can be busy, as can the traffic around the Los Cerritos Center and the Auto Square. So we plan the route and the timing to work around the congestion. We handle the permits, the building access, and the truck size before move day, so nothing holds things up once the crew arrives.