Sunnyhills

Situated between Highway 680 and North Milpitas Boulevard, Sunnyhills is an unpleasant, and vastly under served community within Milpitas. It is firmly gripped in the lower middle-class and has no possible redeeming quality. Its most dreadful quality is the stench from the nearby landfill that can turn off many prospective home buyers. For the prospective resident, the district is mostly overrun by ugly, one-story homes, rusty cars parked in the driveway and an overall gritty suburban complexion. In the past decade, the area has been hit hard by numerous foreclosures and has yet to rebound from it.

Sunnyhills is an almost exclusively residential, blue-collar terrain. Homes are small, boxy and one-story in size. They are situated on small, squarish properties that tend to have a raw aesthetic about them (for example, some weeds sprout up through the cracks in the cement on driveways and along the sidewalk). These properties also don’t have a lot of space. In fact, residences are packed into tight little rows along residential streets. If you’re still interested, home listings are in the range of $300,000 to $500,000, very cheap considering the vast foreclosures in the current market. But if you’re looking to rent, the neighborhood does offer a mix of attractive, colorful apartment buildings and a couple bland, beige, unattractive two-story apartment homes that both line Sunnyhills Drive.

There’s nothing at all appealing about this neighborhood. Even the small Sunnyhills Shopping Plaza (located at the corner of North Milpitas Boulevard and Dixon Landing Road) looks like an old, 1980’s strip mall that has yet to be updated. It includes the usual neighborhood essentials: a couple ethnic eateries, a Walgreens, a Dollar Store (go figure) and a market. Elsewhere, you can find a few non denominational churches dotting the area. In fact, there are two churches situated along Dixon Road--the Greater Love Church-God in Christ and St. Joseph’s Episcopal Church. Also, the Living Water Baptist Church is located on Autrey Street. For young ones, they usually attend, in order, Joseph Weller Elementary and Thomas Russell Middle School (which skirts the southern end of the neighborhood). Both have poor reputations and an ugly aesthetic about them. But its all the neighborhood can afford.

This is a slightly older looking middleclass neighborhood. This is pretty much one of those neighborhoods that looks like it could be anywhere in one of the suburbs of California—lots of smallish 1960’s style ranch homes, and lots mid-range cars that look like they have some miles on them. This is not to say that this is a poor area—it certainly is not that—but rather that this is a fairly middleclass place.

The median price of a home in this Sunnyhills is around $425K, with few rising above $600K. You should also note that currently about 3 out of 4 homes are on the market due to foreclosure, which suggests to me home prices might rise as the housing crisis fades.

There are a number of East Asian restaurants in this area of Milpitas. They are not super fancy for the most part, but you will get some choices when it comes eating out.

The nearby schools are pretty good, especially the high school.

In terms of commuting, there is the light rail into San Jose, and the BART station in Fremont if you are heading anywhere else in the Bay Area. (There are plans underway to extend BART down into San Jose, but given the current state of things, I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting.)

One of the main problems throughout Milpitas, however, is the stink from the landfills nearby. You will definitely get a good whiff living around here and it is fairly persistent. Some days, I am told from residents, it is fairly unbearable. (Though others tell me that you get used to it after a bit and don’t even notice it.) So, unless you are okay living somewhere that literally stinks, Milpitas may not be the place for you.