Jackson Park

Framed by the Central Expressway, Castro Street, Jackson Street and Shoreline Boulevard, Jackson Park is a mixed bag of suburban terrain. While exclusively residential (covering just about four square blocks) the neighborhood is split between newly built and polished homes and ugly, one-story boxes, but nonetheless serve as affordable housing options. Demographically speaking, the racial makeup of the community is internationally diverse and includes such immigrant families of Spanish, Japanese and Portuguese descent.

Jackson Park’s residential quarters are a blend of the polar middle-class. As a whole, the neighborhood offers some lush green community aesthetics. But that’s about all it shares in the two extreme sides of the neighborhood. Towards the northern end, Jackson Park definitely offers the best accommodations. Here, you can find a lot of nice, pristine and two-story house fronts along Fountain Park Lane, Jackson Street and at the end of Elmwood Street. It is this part of the neighborhood that the district is primed for a face-lift as long as the other, lessor homes towards the southern side follow suit. But to me more desrcript, these southernly placed homes tend to be rather old (probably from the mid-1900’s) and are drastically substandard. Aesthetically speaking, they are small, boxy and cramped into little segments of concrete space. For the asking price, house listings within the whole area are within the range of $400,000 to $700,000.

Jackson Park is a nice central location within Mountain View. For commuters, the district is convenient to US Route 85 and Highway 101. Also, the Mountain View Caltrain skirts the southern end of the neighborhood for easy public transit. For entertainment, Jackson Park is just a short drive to the Shoreline Amphitheater, which host some of the most popular bands in the world. Residents are also within walking distance of the Old Mountain View’s abundance of restaurants and chic stores, a nice location for your commercial needs.

Young families send their children to the Mountain View-Whisman School District which covers Monta Loma Elementary, Theurkauf Elementary, Crittenden Middle School and Mountain View High School. However, this is the worst part of town to raise children, as test scores within the vicinity are extremely poor. But you do feel safe with the Mountain View Police Department adjacent to the neighborhood’s quarters.

Jackson Park just a little nook of a neighborhood covering barely 7 blocks. It is made up of really old homes, the kind where if you cleared away the modern cars you could probably shoot a movie set in the 1930’s, just about. White picket fences and those kinds of droopy trees that seem to have been popular in the pre-War period are prevalent here. Think To Kill a Mockingbird.
Well, almost anyway.

Many of the houses here look the worse for wear as the saying goes. They really do look like they are three quarters of a century old. But don’t let this make you think you will get a break on rent. A house in this neighborhood will still cost you $2000 for a 2-bedroom, which I guess is a deal for Mountain View.

If you are thinking of buying here and taking advantage of the location, you can get one of these older homes—pretty much a box with roof (2000 feet) for about $600K. I suppose anything under a million is a deal for Mountain View. But this is really not much to write home about. You would probably have to raze the place and start over, but you could probably make some money on the resale.

In fact, you will find some just finished homes around here for sale for $1.5 million, so it appears you wouldn’t be the first one to take a home here and turn it into an investment. The other thing that is good about this location is that you are just north of Old Mountain View, so you are in walking distance from all the restaurants and cool bars.

I can see someone with a bit of a Beatnik streak really enjoying living in this area.

Unfortunately I can’t really recommend this location to families with young kids. School test scores for this section of Mountain
View are the worst in the city, have pretty average scores when compared to nationwide standards.

As to Jackson Park itself, from which the neighborhood takes its name? It is a little like the neighborhood itself, kind of small and disappointing.

Overall, I would say this section might be a good place to invest for the future. There are signs that it beginning to undergo a transformation that might make it a great place to have a stake when the real-estate market turns around.

Silicon Valley has become a very familiar and famous place in American television. Jackson Park is home to the famous Silicon Valley which has grown in population over the recent years. Thanks to a wave of immigrants a few decades ago Jackson Park has an very diverse population which include Japanese, Spanish and Portuguese. Each ethnic group brought a touch of their own culture which has blended in with modern Jackson Park. The Japanese hold something called the Obon festival every year which honors their dead ancestors and that draws a lot of curious on-lookers from in and outside of Jackson Park. There is plenty of great shopping in the area which is one of the biggest past times for people in the Mountain View area.