<p>I know housing is really expensive, but really, what would you need to spend for 3 bedrooms? Are there any walking neighborhoods? Is this is a place with mudslides/forest fires/earthquakes (well, I think I know the answer to earthquakes…)? Thanks.</p>
<p>Well, the current residents of the area can chime in with greater specificity. But I can tell you that mudslides are a micro-neighborhood phenomenon, when they exist. I don’t associate them with San Jose. But say in Orinda (suburb of SF in the East Bay where they do occur), one area of hillside homes might be subject to them, but another neighborhood 1/4 mile away, on flatter land or with different vegetation, wouldn’t have them. Ditto forest fires.</p>
<p>Are you thinking of the San Jose city limits? Or surrounding towns - that is something the current locals will want to know. If surrounding towns, how far north, south or east would you go? </p>
<p>If you are in NYC (not sure why I think that) the sticker shock might not be so shocking. Otherwise, be sure you’re sitting down when you read the housing costs.</p>
<p>Did you know that you can go to realtor.com and put in your criteria and see current listings for a pretty darn good sense of housing prices?</p>
<p>It’s a great area and San Jose is an up-and-coming (or maybe it already up and came) city which was once treated as the ugly stepsister of San Francisco.</p>
<p>I believe the job is downtown (if there is such a thing). We live in upstate NY - so our houses here are cheap and really great, but I would not be interested in another huge, suburban house (empty nesters!!!). No gated community or anything like that. I’d be more interested in a fun, urban feeling neighborhood - places to walk to (cafes, restaurants), maybe a park, that sort of thing. I suspect that is not what this area is like? I have no idea.</p>
<p>Housing costs may not be a huge factor, because without a huge housing allowance or huge salary increase he wouldn’t take the job anyway. (But that part is complicated.) The odds of his accepting a job out there are about one in ten million - so this is all VERY preliminary.</p>
<p>I can’t speak to the economics or housing market, but, I have been there and it is ridiculously beautiful…</p>
<p>If I could make a strong business case, I’d move to the SF/San Jose area in a heartbeat…</p>
<p>I don’t know in-town San Jose. But if he gets the huge housing allowance, there are definitely towns in the environs which could give you that “walkable” feel. Not urban, necessarily, but lovely towns/cities with walkable shop/restaurant areas from residential neighborhoods:
Los Altos (not Los Altos Hills)
Palo Alto
Menlo Park
(Those are just the ones I happen to know well).</p>
<p>Pricey, though.</p>
<p>Many others and I’m betting that San Jose has developed some in-town residential areas around the commercial center, as well. I’m guessing our resident Peninsula and South Bay experts are still sleeping, but will chime in later.</p>
<p>weenie, I haven’t been personally, but have heard that “Santana Row” has that urban feel that you might be looking for. I’ve read about it and know the planner (not developer or builder).</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.santanarow.com/[/url]”>http://www.santanarow.com/</a></p>
<p>Forest fires? Not in the city. Earthquakes? Yep. You’ll feel a few if you move there. Landslides? Don’t buy a house on the side of a hill, and you’ll be fine.</p>
<p>The Peninsula is one of the really blessed places to live in the world, I believe. You can search around for microclimates in the vicinity. Some houses have more sunshine than others while being very close together.</p>
<p>Expect to pay at least 750,000 to 1 million in a nice neighborhood in the San Jose area. The further up the peninsula you go, closer to Stanford, the higher the prices are. 3bd home in Los Altos, PA, MP in nice neighborhood starts at 1,500,000.</p>
<p>If I have a client buying on a hillside, I jump up and down if they don’t have a geological inspection. Most don’t need convincing. And even that isn’t fool proof but it’s a good first line of defense against getting a home caught in a slide. The essential fact is that population pressure and developers’ dollars have persuaded the pols to let people build where they ought not build. </p>
<p>TheMom refers to some of the government money spent to mitigate disasters in Malibu as “social welfare for the rich.”</p>
<p>(And actually, from a water perspective, LA basin is a stupid place to build a metro area of 12 million people…but nobody planned it that way, it just kinda happened. But that’s a different story. Waiting for the nuclear de-salinization plants.)</p>
<p>The Santana Row development is townhouses - are they so expensive? Mpmom’s housing costs are about right for Menlo Park and Palo Alto.</p>
<p>But it’s funny. I was just thinking yesterday as I walked out of my office building around 5:30pm last night (early night), how beautiful it is here and how lucky I am to live in this environment. Oddly enough, I thought to myself, “I should tell the cc folks.” But that is just a sign of my addiction to this community.</p>
<p>The real estate market is a true hurdle. If you like living elsewhere, it’s not worth it to buy in here. You have to truly love the landscape, the brown hills in the summer, the orange poppies growing wild on the hillsides, the extraordinary blue color of the sky. You also have to like tech - or at least tecchies. You have to smile as the tall guy with a messy pony tail and thick glasses crosses the street in the crosswalk, apparently completely unaware that he is in the middle of traffic - figuring that he might be Whitfield Duffie, security genius, or Tim Van Hoeck, graphics genius, or some such thing. You should also really breath a sigh of relief if you find yourself among liberals, because for the most part, aside from the VC/lawyer/libertarian CEOs, we are liberals.</p>
<p>If all those things really make your heart sing, it’s worth it. I grew up here, moved east for college and business school, and moved back as soon as I could get a corporation to finance the van:). But if you will miss snow, or you hate yoga, or you think organic food is overrated, or you just hate change, mmm, not the place for you.</p>
<p>Some people move here and instantly think, “Gee, this is what I’ve been looking for all my life.” They bite the bullet and buy the house and try to get on a startup wagon that will make them into yet another millionaire. Some people never feel at home.</p>
<p>Yes, Santana Row is expensive. And in demand. And not in “downtown San Jose”. And a little too commercial for my tastes.</p>
<p>I came here kicking and screaming from NY state in '97, having never lived off the northeast coast. And I love it. It is everything Alu says and more. (And I’ve sent you the appropriate PM already, weenie. 
)</p>
<p>Alu, I’m with you: it’s what I’d been looking for all my life. And I never knew it until 6 months after I moved here when suddenly I woke up one day and noticed the clarity and sweetness of the air, felt the warm breeze, looked around me at the outdoors and the fresh produce and the people who tickled my head and heart, and realized it was home.</p>
<p>C’mon out for a visit, weenie: I’ll show you around.</p>
<p>Funny, we moved here 11 years ago because we didn’t want to move to San Jose! My husband used to work for General Electric in the Satelite division, and that division was sold to Lockeed-Martin/ Martin-Marietta in San Jose, California. The company flew a whole plane load of us out there to see who was interested in relocating. We spent a whole day with realtors and were dumbfounded at the housing prices and were not particularly excited about the area. We quickly realized that we couldn’t compare house prices with what we had at home but it was depressing to think that if we moved we would have to get a smaller house on a tiny lot. The other new negatives was traffic (the commute for my husband would have been horrible from the outlying towns we were interested in) and the lack of enjoyable weather. The realtor was telling us how the area was very temperate - didn’t get real cold in the winter or real hot in the summer. To many people that would have been great but I like warm summers and I like a little cold in the winter. Just like the college “fit”, San Jose wasn’t a good fit for us. Most of the PA people did not want to relocate, my husband ended up joining another company and we moved up here.</p>
<p>It is really true that if a small house makes you sad and great weather doesn’t make you happy enough in return, the Bay Area is not your place.</p>
<p>But moot, the air, oh my goodness the air. How to explain? Last night as I walked out I felt the air change from early spring to late spring. From cool dominating to warm dominating. Just a bit. The air gets so gentle as it cools down towards the evening, it holds just a little heat and almost seems to smooch you. And the smell of the flowering trees. And the feel of the sun that is always hotter than the air itself, so shade is almost always cool.</p>
<p>I don’t know. I like the summer evenings in the south too, where you never have to put on a sweater. But beauty to me is in the air of my home town.</p>
<p>I suppose it’s like that for many.</p>
<p>I’ve also lived in the area. Downtown San Jose itself might be of interest to you if your DH is working there and you want the walking and cafes. They have improved it a lot in the last decade.</p>
<p>In the area as a whole known as Silicon Valley, SJ in general is not the most popular option, it’s one of the cheaper ones. Most of it is suburban sprawl with not great houses on tiny lots. Though a 3 bdrm in a better SJ neighborhood will still be about one million dollars and up. There are SJ neighborhoods that would be a little less and a couple where it would be more.</p>
<p>Towns with some charm which are very much in demand are to the north and include Palo Alto, Menlo Park, Los Altos and Los Altos Hill and the tech billionaire towns of Atherton and Woodside. Finding a decent 2500 sq. ft. home (kitchen and baths will probably be dated) for under two million would be difficult. Five million in Atherton and Woodside. </p>
<p>Coming from upstate NY, I think you will be shocked at how little you get for your money.</p>
<p>How pretty is the area? Maybe I’m spoiled by having lived beautiful places, but I don’t find the area particularly pretty. It’s heavy with strip malls, macmansions spoil many hillsides, the hills are brown from lack of rain, and much of the landscape is simply flat. </p>
<p>Traffic is awful as others have mentioned. Personaly, I wanted somewhere prettier (ocean, hills, palms) and less frenzied for that price.</p>
<p>I didn’t want to be the lone negative voice, but now that zagat opened the door - I agree with everything s/he said about San Jose.</p>
<p>We lived in the area for 6 years and never liked the place. San Jose proper is strip malls, blocks of non-descript high tech business buildings, and beige stucco housing developments that lack character. The City is all but devoid of history and culture: The High-Tech museum, the Winchester Mystery House, and Westfield Shopping Town is about the extent of it.</p>
<p>Weather is very hot in the summer. Several weeks of 100+ degrees. People called it “pool” weather because that’s about all you could do on those days.</p>
<p>We actually referred to San Jose as California’s “third armpit.” I won’t name the other two, as I don’t want to needlessly offend.</p>
<p>Having said all that, I do agree that the outlying towns can be beautiful.</p>
<p>Reading the last two posts, maybe I have it confused with another place. I have been to San Francisco and - I thought - through San Jose as it is close to SFO. Do I have it mixed up - how close are these two cities? Aren’t they separated by a bridge, and maybe a 45-minute commute?</p>
<p>I have to say, in spite of the very liberal political environment, I found SFO so beautiful, fun, interesting - and I have a friend who visits there about once a year, every time he comes home he actually gets depressed, it takes him a week or so to feel “normal”.</p>
<p>I have lived in Western New York and in various places around Palo Alto. I thought the Peninsula was one of the best places to live in the world – beautiful and the best weather imaginable (always 10 degrees warmer than San Francisco, but rarely over 85, even in midsummer). I loved what Alumother loves. Also, people talk as if there’s no change of seasons, but I have never since experienced springs as intense as they were there: one week it was cool and rainy, and the next you could stand there and watch stuff bloom. The jasmine was almost overpowering. [Sigh. That would be right about now. The snow is accumulating outside my window.] If you like to grow things (and have a few square feet to do it in), you will be amazed.</p>
<p>The real estate prices are in different universes. Forget Mars and Venus – they have much more in common. However, I will also say that on the Peninsula you spend a lot less time inside your house than you do in upstate NY, so it feels a lot less important.</p>
<p>Yep, we were the family that hauled kiddos (5), dogs, cats and bunny from the Bay area to the rural South (small town in NC) about 3+ years ago. Children had spent most of their childhood in the area and we did really enjoy all it had to offer, BEFORE they got to high school/college. With all of them approaching college/in high school and the housing prices and gas and electric costs rising we knew we couldn’t stay. After much research and homework we ended up in Carolina.</p>
<p>It reminds us in many ways of the Bay area, beautiful spring nights, lots of green, ocean not too far away, and mountains within an hour or two. Life is a little bit slower, not as intense and all four seasons. We are about 45 minutes driving time from several universities (UNC-CH, Duke, NCState, NC Central) and colleges (Meredith, Peace, and others). So in-state residency was a big factor for us.</p>
<p>I thought we would miss northern CA much more than we do. The things that were important to us education, cost-of-living (HOUSING), climate, job opportunities and an affordable way of life we have managed to duplicate here and in some instances it is better than we thought. I really do like sweet tea!</p>
<p>At first glance I thought this is NOT a bastion of liberalism, here on tobacco road but suprisingly, pleasantly, we have found many to be of like-minds. Many refer to Chapel Hill as the Davis of the South! Our small town has its own farmer’s market, some nice independent book stores, shops, restaurants and of course out near the main highway (take a right at the corner ice cream shop, follow the dirt road and keep on goin’, y’all run into a WALMART!) some larger chain stores.</p>
<p>The 2 cemeteries in town have some Confederate and Union (Yankee!) residents and the hitching posts for the horses are still in front of the houses in the downtown along with the old mill houses dating before 1820. It has been a learning experience.</p>
<p>Yes, we do miss living in CA but we don’t miss LIVING in the Bay area!!</p>
<p>Kat</p>
<p>sis also moved here with her family and she just took the kids up to DC to visit and sight-see for a long weekend, now that was something that has been an added plus!</p>
<p>Also her 3200+sq. ft. 3 years ago brand new was $220,000, large lot, wooded, nice stream in the back, big front porch, all hardwoods, 6 bds, office and HUGE walk-up attic. When they sold their home in the Bay area they were able to buy the new home here and put away the rest for their retirement AND their younger children’s college fund.</p>
<p>I get what zagat is saying. I have lived other places with more natural beauty than some of the suburban (I used to call them “slurbs”) areas of Silicon Valley. OTOH, when I close my eyes and visualize the live-oak-studded golden* hills along all of the roadways of the area, I can’t think of much of a way to improve upon that.</p>
<p>I missed the seasons at first. But you get over it when you can walk out your back door and pick your own lemons any day of the year.</p>
<p>I’ve loved lots of places that I’ve lived - each for different reasons: NYC, Maine, Boston/Cambridge, Washington DC, Baja. But the Bay Area is a winner on many many dimensions.</p>
<p>And we left the Bay Area for the kinder gentler pace of life where we are, and kinder gentler cost of living, making a hop of the career treadmills a possibility.</p>
<p>The real estate prices - those are the kicker. Traffic is kind of bad compared to my little town in Maine. But it’s not bad compared to San Diego. So it’s all relative.</p>
<p>*you know you love the place when you cease to think of the hills as “brown from lack of rain” and begin to think of them as “golden.”</p>
<p>P.S. I don’t know where this “100+ degrees” stuff is coming from. Not the Peninsula or Silicon Valley where I lived for many years. Maybe someone was there during a bad week, or in a community pretty far inland.</p>
<p>lts - SF and Oakland are separated by a bridge and a “short” (depending on traffic) commute. So are SF and Marin County. San Jose is “down the road” about 50-60 miles over land. For many years (almost all the ones I lived there), folks in communities near San Jose (Los Altos etc.) would go to San Francisco for city doings, not San Jose, even though the latter was much closer. There just wasn’t that much doing there. I understand that has changed somewhat.</p>