Probably middle class in the Bay Area. I’d stay here. |
You are forgetting OP has wealth cushion, housing fully paid, etc. |
| OP here - realistically, how often do people in a city travel to a neighboring city for dinner, date night, farmers market, weekend excursions? For example, would it be normal for someone in Burlingame to go out to Los Altos or Los Gatos for dinner. Would it be typical for someone in San Carlos to go to downtown Mountain View or University Ave for shopping? Or do families typically stay within their city. |
| Typically you stay within city or adjacent so if you live in MV then you hop over to PA and Los Altos or do a grocery run to Sunnyvale but save San Carlos or Burlingame or Los Gatos for weekend trips. MV has a terrific farmer’s market. |
| Commute is like the beltway on 101. 280 is better. If you are going to Sunnyvale, you might want to look at Mountain View near Castro and the library for walkability to CalTrain (El Camino is far away enough so you don’t hear the train whistle). There’s a Catholic school near there if you want to go private. Otherwise Los Altos is cute and small and kind of like Great Falls here. If your kids do sports you will be driving all over during the weekends so you might as well cut down on commute during week. You couldn’t pay me to live in Burlingame and commute to Sunnyvale all the time. You either walk and hear the train all night long or drive and park somewhere and then have to deal with commute like kiss and ride here. Palo Alto is the furthest north and you can access Stanford’s campus. Menlo is fine but not much going on. San Carlos has a great aviation museum but otherwise bedroom town with weird school districting situation that ruled it out for us. |
What? I live here and I go all over the place. Most people go all over the place. |