Amador Estates

With a name like Amador Estates, you might expect this neighborhood to be one of those snooty sorts of places where you will find lots of luxury cars and high roofed homes with white columns. You know, the kind of place that projects its wealth right in your face to make sure you are properly intimidated.

This is far from what you find at Amador Estates, however. This is actually the prototypical looking California suburban neighborhood with tons of Ranch homes on well-kept streets. It is the kind of place where people spend their weekends mowing the lawn and cleaning the rain gutters, in between shuttling their kids to soccer practice and sleepovers. It is basically the middle class ideal of suburban living—an ideal which the Great Recession and Housing Crisis have made increasingly more difficult to achieve, but which still survives relatively intact here.

What’s the price tag for living this middle class life style?

Around $550,000, which is actually not too bad—relatively affordable. A lot of people actually choose Pleasanton and the surrounding areas for their commutes to their Peninsula jobs because of its affordable prices and safe, suburban living. And that is exactly what you get when you live here. Nice lawns, backyards and sidewalks for kids to bike on.

You also have some okay restaurants nearby and all the usual conveniences of the suburbs. It is nice quiet suburban living—the kind of boredom that makes kids strive to want to leave and do the usual mischief of youth but which is unlikely to get them killed.

All in all, an okay place to settle down and be bored.