Hillcrest

Located just to the west of the junction of Highway 4 and 242, and to the northeast of Buchanan Airport, the Hillcrest neighborhood can roughly be divided into two sections: a northern section where you will find car lots and businesses and a larger southern wedge which is mostly residential.

On the northern end of Hillcrest, the neighborhood is largely made up of macho man type businesses like plumbers and mechanics. It is home to Haws Auto Body, AJ Bono Plumbing, the Dodge and Fiat dealerships, a solar panel installation place and Watersavers Irrigation, for example. It is also home to the only operating drive-in in Contra Costa County (to my knowledge anyway; I can’t really think of another one). The Solano Drive-In is a great place to take your family so they can experience the full 1970’s style drive-in experience. (The movies are fairly run of the mill modern movies. They are playing Black Knight and The Amazing Spiderman right now, for example.)

The northern end of Hillcrest also has a residential section which is made up of a mix of trailer parks and ugly 1970’s style apartment buildings. There are at least 2 trailer parks there, one a sprawling flat facility set up on the usual trailer park residential plan of having a bunch of courts sprawled around the main office.

The apartment buildings are boxy tan buildings with car ports in the parking lots to provide shelter from the worst of the elements. These apartments are relatively well-kept and even somewhat leafy. Apartments here run about $1000 for a one-bedroom and $1400 for a two-bedroom, so it is relatively affordable and much better than dealing with the horrible traffic out of Antioch or Pittsburgh.

To the south of Oliveira, the neighborhood is pretty much all residential. (The area is sometimes subdivided even more with Hillcrest being the middle section surrounding Hillcrest Park and the very southern triangle being the Estates neighborhood.)
The homes here are somewhat shabby, dating from the 1960’s or so with lots of run down looking Eichler homes being the standard. It is a fairly leafy neighborhood with a lot of yards left un-mowed and bushy.

Buying a home here in the Hillcrest neighborhood can run you anywhere from $30 K to $500 K depending on where you buy a mobile home in the northern end or an Eichler in the southern. One of those mobile homes on the northern end of the neighborhood will run you less than $100 K. If you are looking for a more traditional home, like one of the Eichlers that make up the southern portion of the neighborhood, then you are looking at around $200 K as the median price, with the range going from around $50 K to $450 K. Foreclosures make up as much as 90% of the homes for sale here.

As to schools, they are nothing to write home about. Local schools go from terrible to mediocre.

Overall, this is a good starter neighborhood for those just starting out making their climb up the work ladder. You are just far enough away from the centers of Walnut Creek and other Contra Costa areas that you don’t pay the high rents, but close enough that you don’t have to tackle the terrible, soul killing traffic that is Highway 4 during rush hour.