Opinion of Palo Alto, CA

[they don't love you like i love you]

http://www.vox.com/2016/8/11/12439158/palo-alto-housing-costs

Yep I think this can be official labeled the worst place in the US.

[Mr. Smith]

It was a boring suburban place with snooty little college to its southwest well before housing costs.

Go Bears!

Okay but seriously, that's what happens when you allow too much development, encourage too much business, but fall away on infrastructure that really shouldn't be developed anyway.

Or in ecological terms, carrying capacity reached.

[politicallefty]

Housing costs in the Bay Area are astronomical. I think the median rent in San Francisco is something like $4500/month now.  From what I understand, it's primarily the Silicon Valley tech types that are driving up costs. It's one thing if Palo Alto is a place for the rich, but if San Francisco becomes only a city for the rich, the culture and uniqueness of the city will be destroyed.

(For example, the Mrs Doubtfire house I'm sure many people know from the movie has a current estimated value of $6.5 million, last selling in 2000 for $1.4 million. Granted, that is in the very high-end Pacific Heights area where people like Nancy Pelosi live, but the sort of increase is obscene. My mom once lived in Pacific Heights in the late 70s back when I'm sure it was far more affordable.)

I think the cost of housing in many cities is something that flies far under the radar of current political debate and discourse. I honestly am all ears as I don't really have any idea how to make housing more affordable where it's currently expensive or exorbitant. I think literally the only thing I've heard is basically to just keep building housing units to increase the supply. But isn't that what NYC is doing to no avail?

[Antonio the Sixth]

The Stanford campus is beautiful. The rest of the city didn't leave any impression on me.

[DavidB.]

I think this belongs in "Off-topic".

[Enduro]

I think this belongs in "Off-topic".

[SATW]

http://qz.com/784314/facebook-ceo-mark-zuckerbergs-home-expansion-plan-rejected-by-palo-alto-amid-california-housing-crisis/

Relevant.

I voted FF, though, because of Stanford.

[Хahar 🤔]

Oh, hey, this is the place where I was born. At one point when I was young my parents seriously considered moving here, although ultimately they bought a house in Cupertino instead. From my point of view it always seemed a lot like the place where I grew up, with the advantage of convenient access to Caltrain and the disadvantage of being much, much whiter.

When I was in high school, Gunn High in Palo Alto had the first of two separate spates of suicides caused by students throwing themselves on the train tracks; this in turn spawned a series of breathless thinkpieces asking how the pressure of high school could have driven these high-achieving kids to kill themselves. The consensus among the high schoolers of Cupertino was that the presence of so many white people in Palo Alto led to an environment where people were unable to deal with the academic expectations that everyone had; Cupertino, being overwhelmingly Asian, did not face the same problems. When we played Gunn in baseball and football (Palo Alto High was far, far above our level and we would have been killed if we had even stepped on the same field), we always noticed that their teams were full of punks and extremely unpleasant to play against. We figured it was because they were all white.

When I was growing up, I felt like Mountain View was the Xanadu of Santa Clara County, a place where you could walk down Castro Street and find good food from myriad nations and a number of different bookstores and if you wanted catch a train to the city. Palo Alto isn't quite that (for one thing, I've never had a burrito in Palo Alto that compares to the fare in Mountain View), but ultimately it's a pleasant place to live. It's so expensive because it's desirable; the weather is wonderful, the schools are good, the location is pretty. I once had a professor tell me upon finding out where I was from that if he could live anywhere in the world he would live in Palo Alto, and I don't think he was wrong to think that.

The Stanford campus is beautiful. The rest of the city didn't leave any impression on me.

This.   It's a pretty boring city to be honest, and most students on campus never really visit Palo Alto, except to the shopping center area.  Obviously Palo Alto needs to build more housing stock though, along with the rest of the Bay Area.

This is partly a result of Palo Alto not being a college town in any respect and partly a result of Stanford being an entirely self-contained community (the heart of campus is very far from any non-campus area and even graduate students live on campus). I suppose it's a chicken-and-egg situation; it's not clear which of those two things led to the other, but they reinforce each other. Of course the point about housing stock is valid.

[Santander]

California = HP (with a few exceptions)

[rob in cal]

   Palo Alto is a nice city, as are the other peninsula cities.  But the high cost of housing there is almost a joke. We know many people who have left the area to move inland primarily because of housing costs. 

[Blue3]

They keep calling my phone then hanging up when I answer, and leaving blank voicemais.