Palm

With historic Union Cemetery on the eastern end, Palm is one of the neighborhoods right near the heart of Redwood City. It has a fairly high proportion of apartment buildings, especially as compared to other neighborhoods. These are those fairly boxy looking 60’s and 70’s style apartments for the most part (although there are some nicer looking ones mixed in just for good measure).

There are also some older style Ranch homes on nice wide leafy streets. None of these streets seems spectacularly wealthy, but for the most part they are relatively nice middle class neighborhood streets. The kind of streets you might have grown up in if you are a Gen Xer or maybe even a Boomer—nice but a touch drab.

It is one of the more affordable places to find a place to rent on the Peninsula. You can find a 2-bedroom here for between $1600 to $2000.

This is also one of the more affordable places in which to buy with prices ranging from $400K to $1 million (though the higher end price is really a bit of an outlier, being the only home to break the $900K barrier).

This area, like a lot of places on the Peninsula, has been hit pretty hard by the foreclosure crisis. More than one half of the homes located here are on the market due to foreclosure.

In case you are wondering what you can get for around $400K, this should give you an idea. There is a home here for sale for about $440K. It is about 1100 ft. in terms of size and was built way back in 1924. The realtor calls the style it was built in “Contemporary” but I just call it ugly. Not the home for me.

On the upper end of the scale you can find a really nice, truly contemporary looking home (built in 1992) that has high ceilings and a really nice appearance to it, going for close to $700K.

That is a pretty wide range in price--though the price difference doesn’t always point to differences in the quality of these homes. In some cases, the more expensive homes are a little bigger or a little newer but not that much.

You are probably wondering what is the $1 million dollar property that is the high end? It turns out it is just an apartment complex.

Unfortunately this is one of those neighborhoods whose schools are just not very good. Much of this neighborhood is served by Hawes Elementary, which ranks pretty low on most state tests.

That eliminates it as a family area, though it would have been an okay place for students who are willing to commute into places like Palo Alto.

And, just in case you are wondering, the neighborhood is named after Palm Park which resides pretty much at its center.

Palm is an exclusively residential, lower middle-class and highly anonymous Redwood City community. Its a relatively large neighborhood (0.8 square miles) nestled along Woodside Road and encompasses about a dozen gritty suburban streets. Demographically speaking, the district offers a bit of urban chaos. Its total population exceeds 10,000, making for one of the most dense populations in the city. Additionally, it is split evenly between white and hispanic residents.

Palm’s residential quarters doesn’t offer much except or a couple seedy elements. The community is pretty evenly mixed between home-owners and renters. For homes, they are usually one-story in size, fitted on small, squarish properties with maybe a short picket fences surrounding it. Moreover, these residences are usually pretty old, built before the 1970’s and only mildly attractive (if that). The bulk of these homes are priced between $500,000 to $750,000. For cheaper options, perspective residents can rent from the bland, two-story apartment buildings dotted throughout the community. Although they’re not much to look at, you’ll likely be paying a reasonable 1,300/month.

As a whole, Palm is a little rough around the edges. The suburban quarters don’t seem too safe and don’t really offer a pleasing community aesthetic. While typical household incomes within the community are around $53,000/year, it’s just a bit below Palm’s average. And the neighborhood’s biggest perk is that it sits along the San Francisco peninsula and within minutes of the vast San Francisco Bay.