Willow Glen

Cornered into Highway 280 and US Route 87, Willow Glen is its own little moderately upscale community in San Jose. It is a warm and welcoming, which is sometimes hard to come by in the city. The area hosts a somewhat pedestrian-friendly downtown community with a variety of restaurants, retain shops and chain stores. If that isn’t enough, residents are only three miles west of Downtown San Jose, the melting pot of Silicon Valley and all of its pleasures. As for its living quarters, Willow Glen hosts a rather lucrative population, but it can still drop down to lower middle-class in some less attractive areas.

Willow Glen’s residential ambiance is an ideal setting for new families. There are a number of unique and beautiful homes to choose from for the prospective resident. Many homes are of the Victorian and Spanish-style and usually built in the 1920’s and 1930’s. They are a blend of one and two stories, with some quaint and modern looking house fronts. Properties are a bit larger than the average San Jose community. Lots tend to yield lush, green tree-lined streets. If you check the housing listings, they tend to vary drastically in price from small $400,000 townhouses to large, modern style homes circling around $1.5 million. For cheaper living, there are a couple nice looking condominiums and apartment complexes situated along Fruitdale Avenue. Some are nestled behind trees with nice landscaping while others are a bit too dull and drab looking for my taste.

For your shopping needs, Downtown Willow Glen is situated on Lincoln Avenue between Willow Street and Minnesota Avenue. Here, you have your selection of sidewalk cafes, delis, boutiques, vintage shops and kids stores with strollers parked out front. And what’s great about the area is most stores and retail businesses are locally owned.

The community of Willow Glen is a fun place to live. In fact, during the holidays it is known for its yearly Christmas Tree Lights decoration tradition. Many residents participate by decorating christmas trees in their front yards, decorating them in multicolored lights which, when done completely, can be a fun place to drive through. There are also other annual street festivals and farmers markets which draw hundreds if not thousands to the neighborhoods streets. For students, many locals attend the San Jose City College, which just so happens to skirt the northern end of the neighborhood. Many students use this two-year college as a stepping stone into the University of California school system.

Willow Glen, San Jose is, perhaps the oldest residential section of the San Jose. In the northeastern part of this neighborhood you will find homes dating back to the early 1900’s. Basically that means lots of California bungalows as they are known.

Throughout the rest of Willow Glen, however, the most common kind of houses are large luxurious Ranch homes dating to the 1950’s. If you liked the neighborhood in Leave It to Beaver, you will fall in love with the main section of Willow Glen.

Homes from the 1950’s make up more than a quarter of the homes in Willow Glen, with another quarter dating from the 1960’s and 70’s. Less than a quarter of the homes here are from after 1980.

There are some really amazing micro neighborhoods in Willow Glen. The older homes in the northern area are really attractive in a quaint sort of way. They are very reminiscent of Berkeley or West Sacramento, though safer than those areas.

Then there are several idyllic 1950’s style neighborhoods with homes of various types—from large luxurious Ranch style homes to a neighborhood filled with Prairie style homes with sky roofs right in the center of the homes.

There is also a neighborhood that has all red-tiled adobe style homes and several apartment complexes. Basically, if you have a bit of fetish for one kind of home or another, Willow Glen probably has a neighborhood for you.

The median home price in Willow Glen is around $525K.

Willow Glen is also home to San Jose City College—the main community college in San Jose.

Unfortunately, the schools in Willow Glen don’t really match the quality of other schools just to the west or south of here. Del Mar and Willow Glen High School—though not terrible in terms of test scores and other metrics—are only average in terms of the education they offer. This is one of the central drawbacks of the area.

The other good thing about Willow Glen is that with central San Jose just to the north an some spillover into Willow Glen, you have a number of entertainments in terms of nightlife. There is, for example, the Goosetown Lounge and Marmist Cocktail Lounge, just to name a couple.

Overall, this is one of the more enticing areas of San Jose proper for singles and the college aged (especially on the northern end). It also has some cool spots to the south. The main drawback is the high cost of property in Willow Glen.