Flatlands

Stretching roughly from El Cerrito Del Norte BART station to El Cerrito High School, the El Cerrito flatlands is a long packed neighborhood filled with homes on the interior and businesses along San Pablo Avenue.

The median home price here is around $350 K, with prices ranging from $100 K on the low end to $650 K on the high. About two thirds of the homes currently for sale here are on the market due to foreclosure. Homes here are fairly evenly made up of 1940’s, 50’s, 60’s and 70’s era houses, although they look much older. They have a sort of run down, sometimes even dilapidated look to them.

These are mostly smaller homes (less than 1000 square feet) along streets that tend to have a lot of apartments along them. It is really more of a renter’s neighborhood than a homeowner’s neighborhood.

Given what I have said so far, you might expect this to be a high crime area. Actually, however, crime seems to only be a moderate consideration here. In the past 6 months, for example, there have not been any murders here (or anywhere else in
El Cerrito as far as I can tell). There have been about 3 dozen assaults but that is not particularly high for semi-urban areas like this. The biggest problem seems to be robberies and burglaries which had about 90 incidents since the beginning of the year. (This is consistent with El Cerrito’s crime rate in general which although slightly higher than the national average has not had a murder in almost 5 years, I think. Unless one occurred in 2011 which I missed.)

One of the conveniences of the area is that it has its own BART station and that public transportation in general is pretty good.

There are also a number of stores and restaurants in the area. As far as restaurants go there are a number of sort of run of the mill Asian food restaurants like Krung Thep’s. My favorites in the area are Louisiana Fried Chicken and, strangely Nibs, though I don’t know if I would make the trek into El Cerrito to go to them—more of a “we were passing through and dropped
in” than a “let’s head out to Nibs” sort of places.

The only bar I know of in this neighborhood is the Sky Lounge, which has a sort of neighborhood bar sort of a feel to it, imo (just in case you thought I was giving someone’s opinion).

It’s an okay neighborhood—more than a little on the drab side, but passable. Hey there is even a Jazzersize joint—they are totally going to rock the Reagan era.