Reply to Help me find a San Fran suburb

Forum Index » San Francisco Bay Area

Reply to "Help me find a San Fran suburb"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous]The question is what is a reasonable sized house to you?  Houses in the bay area are smaller than houses in other parts of the country in general.

The next question is how far are you willing to commute, and do you have the sort of job where a little bit of regional geographical flexibility is necessary.  For example, if your DH works in tech and getting a job in the peninsula in the future is not out of the question, the East Bay or Marin would not be a strategic place to live.  Are you planning on looking for work too, and is your work geographically flexible and/or centered more in one region of the bay area?  If both of you intend to work in SF, living in Marin or the East Bay would be fine.  IMHO it's easier to find houses in East Bay and Marin suburbs in that price range than closer to SV that have decent schools.

East Bay: Berkeley and Albany sometimes have 3 bedroom houses in that price range (although be prepared to move fast and wave contigencies), El Cerrito/Kensington is a nice area for families although the schools historically are not as good (this is starting to change), Alameda, Castro Valley, Fremont.  Over the hill there's Walnut Creek, Lafayette, and Moraga.  Then a little further down there's Fremont.

Marin: San Rafael is probably the best suggestion, although it is a bit of a commute to SF driving to the ferry.  Other options might be Mill Valley, Larkspur, Kentfield, Ross, etc. but you have to get lucky to find anything in the 1.1 million range.  And that assumes you are OK with a ferry commute and only planning on targeting downtown SF for jobs.

Closer to Sillicon Valley there's Fremont (I know it was East Bay, but it's accessible to the South Bay), and parts of San Jose have decent schools (I think Almaden and Cambrian and Campbell?) but those areas are hell to commute to the city from.  The Pennisula mostly has either unaffordable property or terrible schools.

If the only employment area you are targeting is downtown SF and you are OK with a 45 minute train commute (plus getting to the BART station by car or bike), and you want stereotypically good suburban schools with nice access to nature, I would suggest Walnut Creek or Lamorinda (Lafayette/Moraga/Orinda).[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics