Hi,
This is my second post here @P. I have two kids 8 & 5, looking to purchase our first house. What do you think are good areas here? My budget is 700K to 800K.
Thanks for your time
Best Place to Raise kids in Bay area?
By meetyaks Follow Mon, 5 Nov 2012, 6:31pm 3,821 views 70 comments
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For K-8, I'd look at St. Christopher, St. Martins and just about any of the other parochial ones. They seem to provide good value overall. Sure, they are Catholic schools and I can understand some concern if you are not religious, but after my 12 years in the system I am definitely agnostic lol. Anyway, those places don't force Catholicism onto students.
For high school, there are lots of options. Bellarmine, Mitty, St. Francis, Notre Dame to name a few. Again, Catholic, but they are not going to force conversion onto anyone.
I went through St Christopher & Bellarmine myself (my sister did St. Chris & Notre Dame). I think that St Chris was something like $2500/year when I finished 8th grade in 1998, and Bellarmine was around $7k/year when I left in 2002. Both really did require a good amount of parental involvement, so you aren't just writing checks & expecting Yale students. When I got to college, I attended with a big mix of kids from public & private backgrounds. The one thing that they all had in common was very involved parents that pushed them to do their best while not being overbearing about A+ grades (at least in the engineering program). The kids with "tiger parents" all ended up in pre-law and pharmacy and were generally unhappy with life. They will surely make more money than me, and for their sake I hope that they find a way to enjoy it after what their parents did to them! Anyway, being that I used to lift weights & shoot-the-shit with one of the college admission counselors toward the end of my attendance, it turns out that being an Eagle Scout, working part-time as a cashier during high school and being really into wrenching on my car were big pluses in getting into college since it showed something other than the usual cookie-cutter, "4.6 GPA with APs, 2000+ SAT, varsity football" application. That's something important to think about too. Grades and school-provided extra-curriculars are only one piece of the pie.
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Also, take into account that I am 28, married as of a week ago and not planning to have kids for a few more years. So, take advice from a non-parent for what it is worth. I imagine that perspectives shift a lot once you take the plunge into parenthood.
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bmwman91 says
Sure, thanks a lot for your time. I wish you a very happy married life.
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Two separate issues: best places and best school districts. SF and Berkeley are the best places. If you have the time for home schooling, Khan Academy and YouTube may be the best school districts anywhere. If you don't have the time for home schooling, then as rooemoore said, Orinda and similarly affluent exurbs have the best public schools.
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$7 - 800k would get you a decent place in Pleasanton and would be a relatively short commute to Milpitas. The public schools in Pleasanton score very high.
http://schoolperformancemaps.com/ca/
Cupertino schools are hyper-competitive in an unhealthy way. WSJ article here:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB113236377590902105.html
If you are restricted to that money for housing, very good private schools will be beyond your reach.
If you check out city-data.com you will see that Layfayette, Orinda and Moraga are crawling with lawyers. I would avoid those cities unless you like fucking scumbags.
Pleasanton is your answer. You can throw the other responses in the shitter where they belong.
Biff
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Biff Baxter says
Thanks! Any specific communities I shall look for in pleasanton? How pleasanton compares to Dublin East and San Ramon? Willing put up 10 more min of commute if there is value.
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meetyaks says
My heart says pleasanton. But those new houses in San Ramon (for the same price) is what is putting in dilema. What are your thoughts on that?
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As you mentioned, San Ramon is a farther commute. There are many new houses there but there is also a human warehouse feel to some of the neighborhoods. Southern San Ramon also has some beat up neighborhoods. I was told that it can be windy in some parts of San Ramon, but I'm not that familar with the place. The schools there score very high so this could be an alternative for you.
Dublin has a lot of places that are windy as hell. Windy enough to make you wish you hadn't bought there.
I am not terribly familiar with Pleasanton but I would try to get some distance from the fairgrounds. The downtown area is cute and their are some pretty older neighborhoods nearby. Pretty older neighborhoods retain value and gain value better than many newer ones. Think Los Gatos vs. Silver Creek in San Jose.
While I am not that familiar with San Ramon or Pleasanton, I have studied the hell out of your issue and spent many days in each of them over the last year.
Biff
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By the way, there are a ton of properties in both Pleasanton and San Ramon that are in trouble with their bank. This would give you some buy side muscle.
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The consistently best public schools in the state are in the Acalanes school district. The town you're looking for is Moraga. I think homes will fit your budget as well.
If you visit there I'm pretty sure you'll stop looking.
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Here is some information on neighborhoods in Pleasanton:
http://www.680homes.com/pleasanton-real-estate/
and here for San Ramon:
http://www.680homes.com/san-ramon-real-estate/
Moraga would be a very long commute for you, the traffic up there is notoriously bad, the schools there score nearly the same as several nighborhoods around the bay area (Cupertino, Marin, Palo Alto, San Ramon Valley school district), and as I mentioned earlier, it is crawling with fucking scumbag lawyers.
You can throw iwog's suggestions in the shitter, where they belong.
Biff
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Helpful maps of these neighborhoods with price ranges here:
http://www.680homes.com/san-ramon-real-estate/neighborhoods/
http://www.680homes.com/pleasanton-real-estate/neighborhoods/
Biff
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Biff Baxter says
San Ramon is a place you must try before you buy. People who never had allergies before, suddenly develop them. The wind gusts through some neighborhoods so badly that it's difficult to enjoy the outdoors. It also has NO downtown. If it weren't so safe, I would move much sooner.
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I think private high schools in the Bay Area are 13K or 15K now.
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MsBennet says
Yikes! That's almost 3x what it was a decade ago.
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iwog says
Iwog tends to be right about politics, so he might also be right about schools. Plus, if he has a place in Moraga, you might be able to rent from him. That would be a fun addition to PatNet: landlords and tenants possibly writing about each other! With a budget of 700k-800k, you could pay 2k/month rent for 30 years, even at today's near-zero interest rates.
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bmwman91 says
Yeah, and the housing also trippled in the last decade. Yikes!
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Even the schools in Hillsborough are garbage. I know. all california public schools are not going to do what the parents think should be being done given the outrageous taxes.
Your kid is your responsibility.
Also, the quality of life in the Bay Area for kids is zero.
We are planning a move to san diego or back east, the kids do NOT want to come home to the bay area. In sandiego we have friends, kids play with each other, people are people and not violin math robot tiger idiots like here.
Even if i made 1M / year I would leave, the quality of life is zero here for kids. Sorry. If you think otherwise you've bough the bay area rubbish.
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Mick Russom says
Mick is right.
I grew up here and it was a bit different when I was a child. Having been a parent in two other states, the Bay Area would be one of my last places that I would want my children to experience their childhood in.
If you think differently, you are indeed delusional on the California kool-aid.
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I grew up in the bay area and still live here. It has changed quite a bit, but it is still a very desirable place to live.
There are crappy public schools here as well as some very good public schools. Some of the top rated schools are psycho competitive, like in Cupertino, but in other places they are not.
There are tons of opportunities here for kids. Far more than in most places. In most areas, it is a great place to raise kids.
Taxes here are shitty.
Mick Russom, I support your moving away. It sounds like you haven't had much success here.
exflirt, Chandler, AZ is a shithole. It's a cross between a trailer park and a nuclear waste dump that happens to have a golf course. I support your staying there.
I have no need or desire to defend the bay area. For some stupid reason I am sometimes compelled to respond to the below 80 comments.
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MsBennet says
Yep.
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Biff Baxter says
Ah, Biffy Boy.
As a native Californian even I am confused by many residents’ knee-jerk, defensive reaction to criticism of the state. Generally speaking, it is an aging dump and is totally over rated, however, it can take moving away to see how much of a life you can have if you break ties with the state.
People from other states have this outdated perception that if they just move to California they will be beautiful, wealthy, happy, and spend their free time rollerblading in 80 degree weather near the beach with a great tan. If they relocate, reality comes crashing down on them as they sit in traffic, experience their first paycheck, and visit their children's school.
They can't afford to buy a house (heck, they can't even afford their rent!) so they rent some 1970's shack that's housed 41 different families (and looks/feels/smells like it) but is considered a decent house - - by Bay Area standards. Everyday tasks are a hassle, from laundry to groceries. No sense of community - most people don't speak the same language, they park their cars in their driveways (or where the lawn used to be) and go right into their houses without ever meeting their neighbors. The roads are horrible and I hope you like the inside of your car. The cities were built years and years ago so not only are the roads patched up and eroded, but the cramped, crowded streets are not built for getting today’s traffic volumes off the road and where it needs to go – how much does anyone enjoy stopping at EVERY LIGHT and the subsequent effect on gas mileage? And if you like sitting in traffic even at 12pm on a SUNDAY afternoon, then hurry up and come to the Bay Area!
Days consist of working, working, working, rushing. Hurry up and bring me my chimichanga, it’s been 7 minutes since I placed my order. I am a busy, prominent person and I have a meeting I have to go to, you inconsiderate person. Rush furiously back to work (dodging that person braking in the middle of the lane for absolutely no reason - honking at that person still stopped at the green 6 seconds after it turned – nearly hitting a bicyclist rocketing illegally through a red light as if they are invincible) to get on that conference call so I can impress people with my important job.
Natives tend to be provincial, judgmental, intolerant, are smug, and have disdain for almost every other part of the USA. So many people are painfully ignorant to what's going on in the rest of the country, and as a matter of fact have a dismissive, haughty view that “if it’s not California” it doesn’t count or really even exist.
Political correctness is taken to a new, unimagined high and political opinions are almost uniformly homogeneous. Different thoughts don’t get bounced around to understand the options and determine which one works best. Cities are dysfunctional and going bankrupt.
32 children per classroom, your children are surrounded by hoodlums and absorbing their attitudes and tricks of their trades. If you want your children to eventually move out of your house, add private school to the outrageous cost of living or move to one of those fortress areas, budget be damned. Besides, if you loved your children you’d get 2 part-time jobs to pay for that private school, family time is over-rated anyway.
Current job growth consists mainly of low-wage jobs paying less than 50K per year, leading to more commuters and stressed out families. Of course, that will help Modesto and Stockton, and they do sell tires that can go 60,000 miles so the set only has to be replaced every 1.5 years. Public transportation, a true value in urban areas, is not good.
Of course one person’s negative is another one’s positive and not everyone will experience many of these. But most will.
Me, I’ll take Arizona, one of the three top states for California’s population exodus. I arrived in AZ on the first day of summer and found I adapted surprisingly and unexpectedly quickly to the dry heat. My job is fulfilling, my housing is beautiful, I spend almost no time driving (whizzing on roads designed to get the cars to their destination, not parked on the pavement), my neighborhood is charming and safe, and the residents are friendly. The pace of life is slower, my daughter’s school is outstanding, the community is active, and I enjoy weekends with plenty of time to read and relax by the pool. I haven’t seen one person yet with their underwear sticking out of their pants (granted, I don’t go to Phoenix) – and yes, that’s a great thing, especially for my daughter. I don’t want her influenced by a high proportion of thugs. I have money for a maid service, definitely a splurge but now I get to spend that time with my daughter.
Yeah, it sucks here :-) But I do understand it’s not for everyone.
My experience - I grew up in Milpitas then moved out of the state. Recently I lived in a squarely middle class neighborhood in Milpitas, one of the safest cities in the area. Standard sized (1300 sq ft) houses in "bay area" decent condition for 500K+ in my subdivision, my parent's house is 1.5 miles up the road and worth 1million+. Had to recently replace all the pipes in their entire house, what a chore, but to be expected when most houses are aging. They pay $1K per month in taxes on their "paid off" house, their water bill during the warmer months when they have to water the lawns is $300+.
Now back to the discussion of the best Bay Area city for children.
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MsBennet says
Those are the cheap ones. The really good ones are $30 - 40k per year per child just for tuition.
Biff
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exflirt says
I was talking about the bay area, not the state. I wouldn’t go near Sacramento, Stockton, Fresno, Bakersfield, etc. They are like Arizona but not as bad.
exflirt says
I don’t know many people with those perceptions. I think people perceive California as a place with jobs and great weather. California does have great weather. The bay area has tons of jobs, mostly high end and low end. The jobs in the middle are becoming fewer and fewer, just like everywhere else in the country.
Phoenix, Arizona has horrific traffic, just like the bay area. The difference is that we don’t sit in a car in 110 degree heat.
exflirt says
Housing costs in the bay area are really high. Real estate in hell is really cheap.
Everyday tasks are easy unless you live in San Francisco. You have more choice in the bay area for shopping, entertainment, sports, etc. Virtually everything is close by and abundant.
There does seem to be less of a sense of community although I know people who have developed significant social networks in their neighborhoods by putting in a little effort.
I like the fact that people speak several languages here. I get bored of nothing but people who look like me. I like being exposed to different cultures. Isn’t that why people travel? I find that people who are not doing well often blame people who do not look like themselves. I guess that is easier than taking responsibility for their failures.
If you are hitting traffic here at noon on a Sunday, you must be in the Milpitas to Oakland/Richmond corridor. That place is a dump and I don’t recommend it. I would pick Milpitas over Arizona but I would pick Arizona over Oakland, Richmond and East Palo Alto. Arizona is also better than Detroit.
exflirt says
Things do move fast here and often not in a good way. It’s not a very relaxed environment. The prominent person threat is really minimal and often imagined by people who feel inadequate. The retarded, snobby, I’m better than you attitude is something I’ve seen in every community, in every state. It is always a tiny minority of idiots and only seems to have an effect on insecure people.
And I think people here don’t honk enough. I rarely hear a horn go off. In New York they honk constantly and it works wonders. It makes people pull their finger out of their ass and move. Where is that not needed?
exflirt says
I am pretty judgmental. I have found bay area natives to be super tolerant. They don’t have disdain for the rest of the USA. We don’t think too much about places in the middle of the country because little happens there. Other than Jared Loughner, what noteworthy thing has happened in Arizona lately? Provincial? Is Arizona sophisticated? Did you fall off the dishwasher in your front yard and hit your head?
exflirt says
Political correctness is pretty bad here but there are plenty of us that are anything but. Cities are going bankrupt here because of screwed up government spending, mostly in the central valley. That is not unique to California.
exflirt says
I am not surrounded by hoodlums. More affluent areas have lower crime and fewer criminals. The bay area is affluent and Arizona is not. Phoenix is known for its gang problem and Chandler is Phoenix (time to stop kidding yourself on that one).
exflirt says
Everyone experiences boiling heat in Arizona.
exflirt says
The schools in your neighborhood do not compare to the ones in decent parts of the bay area.
Life is slower in Arizona. As you mentioned, you can read or sit there.
exflirt says
Yeah, it does.
People move to Arizona because it is cheaper, not better.
Biff
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Biff Baxter says
Yeah, I was gonna say, "It's not hard to find pre-schools in San Francisco that charge 13-15k per year.
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meetyaks says
On a train living California.
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meetyaks says
I have strong feelings about it. Money can fix cosmetics and all house becomes old over time. No amount of money can fix the location. It's the reason why a mansion in Brentwood is worth less than a palo alto garage.
You'll do much better to buy based on location as long as it fits your basic need (3/2 with school district perhaps). Put 25K and any home can look and feel like new.
There's way too much flat land in the tri-valley especially heading the direction of Livermore. That would severely limit land potential in the future. For a simple 3/2 SFH, I would buy in Fremont, east (mision) instead. The land is much more valuable and will retain value better in the future. You can test this theory just by looking at how prices react in 2008-2012 in a location like Mission Fremont and say Danville. The place that drops the least and bounce up faster/stronger are the places you want to buy. If you must have a 3K sq feet mansion, by all means look into Danville, Blackhawk, Winderemer, Alamo.
In the meantime, your commute is worlds better, not just to Milpitas, but Santa Clara, Palo Alto, San Jose etc. essentially all your prospective employers and all the prospective demand will view it the same way. It's not like there is a Cisco Systems in Walnut Creek where San Ramon makes sense.
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FunTime says
This is true for the Peninsula also.
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Exflirt:
Never heard the phrase "to each his own"? Me, I'd rather put a gun to my head than move from San Francisco to Arizona. Sure it costs more here, but it's worth it. And I couldn't care less how many people have lived in my house before me. I prefer an old house.
It's called "personal preference" not "knee-jerk defensive reaction". You live your life, I live mine. No one has to be right or wrong for wanting different things.
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Biff Baxter says
On the Record: Larry Ellison
Published 4:00 a.m., Sunday, September 7, 2003
Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/business/ontherecord/article/On-the-Record-Larry-Ellison-2590921.php#ixzz2BnNVjEW3
Q: What do you think Silicon Valley is going to be like in five or 10 years?
A: It's going to be a lot more like Detroit than like Silicon Valley. The great news is we're going to be the molecular biology hub for the world, but we will have more competition -- in San Diego, in Boston, in Tel Aviv. But the gestation period of a company in molecular biology is very different from that of a software company. The returns will be slower in coming, so the whole metabolism of the valley will have to be retuned for that industry.
(update: Biotech not doing so hot !)
Q: The folks at Intel have said that any growth the company experiences will be outside California, that they have no intention of growing here. What's your philosophy on that?
A: Certainly not that. Hopefully we'll grow all over the world.
Under Gov. (Gray) Davis, California has become a very unfriendly place for business. And Mr. (Cruz) Bustamante has said he's going to raise taxes again. You want to tax me personally? God bless you. You want to tax businesses? You're crazy -- you're driving jobs out of the state.
We should have business-friendly policies in California. It's good for job creation, and it's good for California.
Q: What's your career advice for all the laid-off techies out there?
A: We saw the zenith in tech jobs around 2001. We saw a point where half of all capital spending was tech. That will never happen again.
My industry will never come back. Nor should it. Computer systems are still too expensive. They're too labor intensive.
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meetyaks says
And the best answer is... 30 years ago ! take your pick anywhere.
Vanishing Public Companies Lead To The Incredible Shrinking Silicon Valley
http://www.siliconbeat.com/2010/02/17/vanishing-public-companies-lead-to-the-incredible-shrinking-silicon-valley/
One of the most significant trends I’ve been watching over the past decade is the dramatic drop in public companies in Silicon Valley. Naturally, that number was artificially inflated during the dot-com bubble when it reached 417 in 2000. For our purposes, Silicon Valley includes San Mateo and Santa Clara counties, and the southern half of Alameda County.
But the number of public companies has dropped for nine straight years now. Even when IPOs briefly reappeared in 2006 and 2007, they weren’t enough to overcome the net loss of public companies through acquisitions or bankruptcy.
In 2008, the number had fallen to 261. We just updated our records and the latest figure is 241.
That’s not just less than the dot-com era, that’s well below the 315 public companies the valley had in 1994 when the Mercury News started keeping track.
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thomaswong.1986 says
I'm not clear on what point you think this article is making. Do you agree with Larry? Do you disagree? Does the article reinforce that the bay area is good or not good, has jobs or does not have jobs?
Biff
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I think kids are overrated. At best, it is an expensive hobby. It is even more expensive in this area.
It is wrong to think this way.
If we want a desirable future we must incentivize capable parents to procreate. However, the world is going the opposite way. Birth rates in most industrialized countries are dropping. At the same time, the world faces runaway population expansion.
It is sad to have to think that people are liabilities but policy trends in this world is forcing this reality upon us.
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Peter,
The smart and capable cannot out-breed the dumb masses. We do not need more smart people having kids. We need to fix the system so that the dumb and incapable are disincentivized from procreating more, while also enacting EFFECTIVE programs that can drive their offspring into the smart and capable category. We have enough human stock; we are just wasting it.
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bmwman91 says
How about a global cap-and-trade birth permit system? Each parent is given 0.3 units free of charge. A couple will therefore have 0.6 units.
To have a child, 1.0 unit is required. The couple will have to buy 0.4 units from the open market. Childless people can sell their units on the open market too! :-)
If a country has more births than allotted units a carbon tax will be levied against them.
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Free access to birth control and abortion should be the core belief of any conservative.
Hey, if the world relies on an ever-increasing population then what we know as life is nothing more than a Ponzi scheme.
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Oh no. The polititards are invading.
Biff
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Sorry for invading...
But the Bay Area really is not an ideal place to raise kids.
The schools are really not so great. The "good" ones are in very expensive areas. And even then they are "good" only because the parents can afford to pay a premium.
It is screwed up.
Can policies defeat the market? Public education is supposed to be fair yet the market found a way around it. Sad.
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thomaswong.1986 says
Sadly that is true.
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Biff Baxter says
since 2000 we have shrunk locally.. and expanded outwards.. there are plenty of Happy HP, Intel, Oracle and many other out of state employees doing really, and out of state govt that attracted the business are all to happy to bring in the salaries to their regions.
it was great 20-30 years ago in santa clara county..
Rejoice.. your Super Majority Democrat Controlled State Govt is keeping
those bad evil greedy Corporations and their drones under watch and control.
Intel plans to double $3B Oregon R&D site
Silicon Valley / San Jose Business Journal by Cromwell Schubarth, Senior Technology Reporter
Date: Wednesday, October 24, 2012, 2:00pm PDT
Intel on Wednesday talked about plans to as much as double the size of a $3 billion research site in Oregon now under construction.
The Portland Business Journal, an affiliate of this newspaper, said the Santa Clara, Calif.-based chip maker (NASDAQ: INTC) wouldn't say the exact size of the expansion except to say that it is comparable to the originally planned project. This would put the expansion at about $3 billion.