Mid Clayton Valley

It is no doubt that Concord mostly gets a bad wrap. It is overcrowded and somewhat dirty and poorly kept in spots and often doesn’t feel like the best of cities. There are certainly parts of Concord where most people would not feel safe living. But Concord is a big sprawling city and it is not uniformly one way. Let’s not paint with too broad a brush.

If you follow Ygnacio Valley Blvd. east, for example, into the Mid-Clayton Valley neighborhood, you get a very different sense of Concord. This eastern neighborhood feels pretty much like one those typical 1970’s kind of neighborhoods that many of us Gen-Xers remember from our formative years.

The Mid-Clayton Valley neighborhood is a nice mix of apartments and Ranch styles homes (of the late 50’s and 60’s variety, not the older, smaller kind that are rather dreary). The streets with Ranch homes are actually fairly well-maintained and aren’t showing the signs of age that other similar Concord neighborhoods have been showing.

Along the main roads that border Ygnacio Valley Blvd. (Treat, Clayton and Ygnacio Valley) you get most of the apartments. These are pretty average places though well-run and clean. There are some newer ones just being built. Prices run between $900 and $1250 for one-bedrooms and $1250 to $1600 for 2-bedrooms.

Clayton Road is the main drag in terms of supermarkets and strip malls. These are nice spacious shopping areas with plenty of parking and that wide-open suburban feel that you don’t always get in Concord. (Nothing gets the blood pressure up quite like hunting for a parking spot in a crowded, overrun supermarket parking lot just after work.)

As to the homes here, as I mentioned they are mostly Ranch homes on fairly quiet streets of the kind I associate with my childhood in the San Fernando Valley down south. (Not like it is now, but as it was in the 1970’s.) The median price for a single-family home is around $400,000. In the last year homes have sold from between $200 and $750 thousand, though most go from between $300,000 and $550,000.

What about crime and schools--the usual drawbacks of Concord?

Crime, as I have stated before, is about average for most of Concord and though I don’t have any hard stats to go on (Concord doesn’t get picked up by the crime reporting databases I have found), I would be willing to bet that this is one of the lower crime areas in Concord.

As to schools, they are a bit of a mixed bag. The northwestern end of Mid-Clayton Valley is served by El Dorado Middle School, for example, which has an API of 3--solidly below average. On the other hand the southern end of the neighborhood is served by Sherwood Elementary and Clayton Valley both with API’s of 7--solidly above average. There are also some middling schools that serve the neighborhood overall. Put simply, however, I would say that if you have kids, try to stick to the southern end for the better school experience.

As to commuting, it will take you a bit longer than from areas farther to the west. That said, it is nowhere near as bad as Antioch or Pittsburg.

Overall, I would say this is one of the better neighborhoods in Concord.