August

August is the kind of place where houses have bars on the windows and chain link fences around their front yards. This is one of the easternmost sections of Stockton. It has an old timey sort of feel in that it doesn’t really have sidewalks so feels like it sprung up “naturally.”

You will not find a cheaper place to buy a home than this. Homes typically sell for less than $100,000. These are not trailers in trailer parks. (Though there are some these here as well.)
These are actual full-fledged houses. Some are a little worn out but most fairly promising. The age of the homes here is pretty mixed. You have a ton of 1950’s Ranchers, but mixed in you will also find a fair number from every decade, even homes built within the last decade, even though they only sell for about $100,000. What is strange is that even the newer homes just don’t feel all that much newer. They just look like someone has refurbished one of those older Ranchers--which is perhaps what they have done.

Of course, whenever you have low home prices in an area which has a bad reputation you start to look for crime and bad schools.

And this is pretty much what you find here. Crime is high. In the last six months the area (and the area just to the west of it) has experienced:

1 murder
250+ assaults
200+ burglaries
100+ robberies
dozens of rapes and attempted rapes

In Stockton overall, the crime rate is more than twice the national average and has been for a while. Looks like this may be a typical Stockton neighborhood in that sense.

Schools are similarly, from what I have heard, beyond terrible. Completely dysfunctional.

None of this, of course, is helped out by the fact that Stockton appears to be in the process of declaring (has declared?) bankruptcy. Will definitely not put more cops on the street.

I only passed through here once. Would definitely not want to live here.