Alameda is a nice, quiet place with a ferry to SF (and the Lucky JuJu pinball joint aka Pacific Pinball Museum). I looked for houses there, but my friends are concerned that Alameda's low, flat land area will be flooded in ~50 years by sea level rise from global warming.. :\
Where do you commute? My possible offer's in Mountain View, and that seems like it would take a while.
I also looked at Fremont/Newark, but have never physically been there. What's that area like? School district maps say some of the schools are decent.
FYI I am 35 with a new baby, so the question is "can a family live in SF comfortably without having a cash-out event or a salary in excess of $240k?" The offer I'm pursuing could, if it pans out, be good but it probably would not quite be that good.
Good luck. If you're planning on buying, the only areas in the Bay Area affordable to a single-income family will be places you don't want to live (East side and south San Jose, Hayward, and the nastier parts of Oakland). Also, in the current real estate market, you're going to need all-cash (or a very, very high down payment) and be willing to waive all the usual contingencies. It is a brutal seller's market, and as a buyer you are competing with foreign cash investors and hedge funds buying properties 10 at a time.
This is from someone who has been trying unsuccessfully to buy a home in the Bay Area for the last year and a half. We wrote an offer on a home that got 45 written offers and ended up selling for 25% over asking.
My job's in SOMA, a bit closer to Alameda than Mountain View. MV is probably one of the worst places, price-wise. You probably won't find budget housing near there, especially with a family/small child. Aging* millionaires have driven housing prices through the roof anywhere there's a good school system.
I live in Fremont. It's boring suburbia. Lots of identikit housing, no good restaurants, not much to do. On the positive side, it's relatively inexpensive and is 30 minutes from Mountain View, San Jose, or Berkeley outside of commute hours.
If you care about living somewhere hip and exciting, Fremont is not for you. If you're okay with suburbia that's outside the heart of Silicon Valley, but still reasonably close, it's worth considering.
I'm pretty sure they made that comment under the assumption that your job offer was in SF. That was the impression I got reading your original comment as well.
Have you considered living in one of the many cities on the peninsula that are all extremely close to the Caltrain and BART tracks, 101 & 280 freeways, and much better schools than those in the east bay? They're also very close to the actual city you would be working in (Mountain View). Much closer than SF.
MV housing has gotten insane since Google started their hiring binge in 2011. My rent's gone up nearly 50% since then. And Google's demographics are changing: average age is now about 31 (up from 28 or so when I started in 2009), so many of them will likely be having kids in the near future and driving up house prices even further.
Fremont is decent as long as you don't mind boring. Unfortunately, the commute over the bridge can really suck during rush hour (this applies to all the East Bay communities). Sometimes I'll take 237 around to Mountain View to avoid it, but both 880 and 101 have severe traffic issues.
A bunch of my friends actually bought houses in the Cambrian Park and Willow Glen parts of San Jose. These are still reasonably affordable, safe, and they're about a 20-minute commute down 85 from Mountain View. 85 is a parking lot between the Googleplex and about El Camino or Fremont Ave during rush hour, but opens up fast once you get past 280. If you're getting on at El Camino (eg. a downtown Mountain View office) and then commuting to San Jose it's not all that bad.
I've heard Santa Clara isn't bad either - it's 10 minutes from Mountain View without traffic (much worse in rush hour traffic, since it's on 101), but it's largely Korean/Vietnamese/Japanese immigrants and so prices have stayed relatively low so far.
All of these communities are really boring, with basically no downtown or civic events. One of the large factors that drives prices up are young professionals that want a high quality-of-life in addition to working at a fancy tech job.
Fremont can be a good choice... Have lived there for a while and it has many convenient things:
- BART station: easy ride to the city
- Dumbarton bridge if you need to cross to go to Palo Alto (need to pay the toll but totally doable)
- taking 880 south, and then 237 you can then be in Mountain View/Sunnyvale area in 30 to 45 minutes by car depending on traffic.
- House prices in Fremont last time I checked were going up but they were still lower than the City or lower than south in SV
Overall Fremont is a good alternative choices which give you access to the City/Berkeley in 40 to 50 minutes drive/BART, and to the SV in the south.
I was living in Fremont with my wife (no kids) for a salary way less than $240K, so totally doable IMHO.
