ValleyGirlTori

Noralto, like its Old Sacramento neighborhood just to the south, has been hit hard by the Foreclosure Crisis. Foreclosures, many at rock bottom prices, make up a full 80% of all the homes being sold here at the time of this writing.

Unfortunately, these homes are not fantastic residences to begin with. A full half of the homes here were built before 1950. There are some newer homes, but even these are not doing particularly well. Most homes sell for around $100K around here (a little better than its neighbor to the south), but still no homes break the $300K mark (or rarely even $250K).

There are two public elementary schools (and a private one) serving Noralto. One is Harmon Johnson Elementary and it is below average in terms of test scores. The other, Noralto Elementary on the northern end of the neighborhood, however, fairs a little bit better managing to rate average overall in terms of test scores. This actually makes Noralto Elementary one of the best elementary schools in this area of northern Sacramento.

On the far northeastern end of the neighborhood you also get a number of boxy 1970’s style apartment complexes which in part accounts for the high density of Noralto.

Over all, this is not a great neighborhood where to live. Most people would choose somewhere else if given half the chance. That said, it is better than Old North Sac just to the south.

Erickson Industrial Park?

Warehouses, Loading Docks and Big Rigs… Warehouses, Loading Docks, and Big Rigs… Warehouses, Loading Docks and Big Rigs..

That’s it. That’s all.

Ellis and Ellis Signs. McHenry Drapes. American Medical. Floral Supply Syndicate. Sears Auto Parts. Magnolia Upholstery.

Warehouses…

Loading Docks…

Big Rigs…

Period

Old North Sacramento is one of those older Sacramento neighborhoods that is definitely showing signs of age. Especially on the western end where there are some ramshackle shacks with cracked, oil stained driveways, discolored lawns and dilapidated roofs with broken shingles and drooping eves.

The vast majority of the homes here date from before 1950 many having been built in the 1920’s. Unlike in the Land Park neighborhood, however, there is little that is quaint about the structures you find here. They simply look old and ready to be torn down.

As to home prices, they are pretty much rock bottom with more than half of all homes going for under $100K (many near the $50K mark, actually). 80% of homes currently for sale are due to foreclosure.

On the eastern end of the neighborhood, the residential area gives way to an even uglier industrial park which is home to a number of parts suppliers and repair businesses. Not very appealing unless your are into rusted metal and scrap part hunting.

There are some diner like establishments in this neighborhood and the usual set of bland fast food places, but truly there is little to bring anyone in from the outside for a visit.

As far as nightlife, you do have a handful of bars including a dive by the name of Nite Hawk Tavern and a gay bar, “The Bolt.” Other than that, the pickings are slim indeed. It’s basically the kind of place you would find in a movie with soundtrack by Tom Waits

Woodlake, Sacramento is a tale two neighborhoods. On the western end of Woodlake, you have a trailer park, North Sacramento Motor Home Park—scrunched right up where the light rail and North Sac Freeway fork. The older rickety homes in this western half of the neighborhood have a distinctly run down look to them, matched by the large 70’s style gas guzzlers parked in their driveways.

The flimsy 50’s style Ranch homes in this section of the neighborhood typically go for under $200K. As to rents, you can find apartments here for around $600/month.

Dividing the eastern and the western ends of the neighborhood however is a creek. On the eastern end of Woodlake, the neighborhood takes on a distinctly southern feel, somewhat resembling Savannah, Georgia perhaps. The leafy streets and irregular sized blocks give the area a certain small town feel I spots.

The homes in this area of Woodlake are much larger than their west end counterparts and the lawns are well kept. Dating from the 40’s and 50’s, the homes are fairly attractive in a classic sort of way.

On this end of the neighborhood home prices of non-foreclosed homes climb to $200K to $300K, though about half of the homes for sale are in foreclosure. They will typically go for half that amount.

Despite the nice homes on this end of the neighborhood, however, Woodlake Elementary consistently underperforms being below average in terms of test scores across the board.

Woodlake Sacramento is not just a residential neighborhood, however. Woodlake is also home to the Canterbury Inn and to KSTV, both nestled away on the southern edge of the neighborhood.

Overall, a neighborhood with definite potential if they improved the schools.

Johnston Business Park is, as the name indicates, a commercial office park. This is not one of those newer looking office parks with the perfectly manicured lawns and glossy, tinted glass offices. This is more of an older style office park where things have a distinctly worn down look to them—more of a big rig and car repair sort of an area than a computer headquarters sort of an area.

A typical company in the area is Capitol Plywood—a lumber disturber for Sac. There are also a handful of Tech companies in the “park” as well, including Software Pacware (a medical billing software designer, I believe) and similar companies.
The two most notable companies here are Bowler’s Paradise (your number one choice in bowling balls and equipment!) and KYMX 96.1—a fairly bland soft rock radio station (basically elevator music with a DJ).

On the eastern end of the “neighborhood” there is a Radisson Hotel, an REI and a CostCo.

Put simply, this is one of those areas necessary to business and commerce in an area, but really pretty uninteresting otherwise.

Oh yeah. They have an Extreme Pizza there too. So if you want some extremely average pizza, you have found Heaven: Johnston Business Park.

The Northgate and Gardenland neighborhood are much like the rest of the South Natomas area—filled with older homes. The neighborhoods were hit hard by the foreclosure crisis, with a full three quarters of homes for sale due to foreclosure.

This is one of those California neighborhoods, like so many others, that is filled with Ranch style homes. In the case of this neighborhood, the homes are from the two previous building booms in the 1950’s and 1970’s. You can definitely see this in the style of the homes here, with the slightly smaller 1950’s style Ranch homes really beginning to show their wear.

Northgate and Gardenland mostly have the feel of a neighborhood that has seen better days. The homes feel a bit worn down, many of the lawns are un-kept and the trees seem to droop wildly across the lawns. Many of the older homes also have a particularly flimsy look to them.

The schools also show some signs of neglect with test stores indicating slightly below average performance overall.

The restaurant selection in this area is also fairly limited with taquerias ruling the day. If you are not into Mexican food, it will mostly be pizza or Thai food here—though none of them are the kinds of places you would drive here for as far as I can tell.

Nightlife and gyms are pretty much non-existent here, though.

River Gardens is located on the south eastern end of South Natomas, and like the other parts of the South Natomas neighborhood, it is made up of older style ranch homes and has the feel of the kind of neighborhood your grandparents might live in rather than the kind of neighborhood where young couples would choose to live.

Homes here are on the lower range of prices with most of these older homes being currently priced under $200K. As with the nearby areas, River Gardens has been hit hard by the foreclosure crisis, which in large part explains the rock bottom prices in the neighborhood.

The neighborhood does have a rundown 70’s era strip mall with a drug store, a 99 cent store and giant parking lot.

River Gardens also borders Discovery Park on its southern end, so there is lots to do in terms of outdoor recreation.

The other thing that makes this neighborhood a little bit different is the presence of the Jehovah’s Witness Temple.

Other than that though, there is nothing else to write home about when it comes to River Gardens.

South Natomas is a sprawling, mostly residential neighborhood.

Home prices in this neighborhood are rock bottom. Given that most homes were built during the Reagan Era, the reasons might not be that obvious at first. But a closer look gives us a bit of a clue. Perhaps driven by White Flight, many people started to move out in the early 2000’s as the neighborhood, with its moderate home prices, began to diversify. Unfortunately, this new wave of homeowners moved in just as the conditions for the real estate crisis were being set. If you look at the market today—3 of 4 homes in South Natomas are being sold due to foreclosure. It’s a sad statistic.

The oldest part of South Natomas is in the southeast by Northgate Park. You will find a plethora of 1970’s style ranch homes here (and even a few from the 50’s and 60’s back when Natomas was a much small corner of Sac than it is today). This is the pick-up trucks and picket fences part of town, where lawns are a touch unkept and older trees have reached their shady maturity. The kind of place that you might expect your grandparents to live. Homes in this section of town hover around a very reasonable $100K.

In the late 70’s homes and apartments spread out across the top of West El Camino bringing with them even more 1970’s style ranch homes, with their perfectly symmetrical front lawns and shady front lawns. You can walk many of these street and feel like you are in the middle of the San Fernando Valley and that Jimmy Carter is still president. Except for the cars, of course, which here are mix of economy cars and muscle cars.

The western sections of South Natomas started filling up in the early 80’s and by the late 80’s the northeast section of Natomas started picking up its pace of constructions. About 2/3 of all homes in Natomas were built while the Big Gipper was prez and so during that other big real estate boom associated with the Savings and Loan debacle. These are those nice Contemporary style homes with shingled roofs, lots of windows, high ceilings and a feeling of luxury even in the more modest varieties.

After that last debacle, it was a good decade before any new homes were built in Natomas. You will be hard pressed to find a home built in the Clinton administration in Natomas.

As to schools, the Natomas High School is not really a draw, being average or maybe even slightly below average in terms of test scores as are the majority of the schools in Natomas. The heavy turn-over of homes has not helped in terms of creating a sense of community either with people moving out virtually overnight in some cases.

Restaurant choices are mediocre at best with a few Chinese food places and Mexican joints to bring a bit of flavor to what is basically fast food culture.

Nightlife is just as unsatisfying.

Despite all this, I still think this might not be an altogether bad place to raise a family if you are say a single mom on limited income. Things aren’t great, but they are affordable and far enough away from the more severe problems of urban life.

As the name indicates, Natomas Corporate Center is largely an office park located just to the north of Discovery Park, with I-5 just to the west. You will find the HQ for RCB Corporation, a financial industry leader in the area (River City Bank is a subsidiary) and Informatix, a tech consulting firm.

The office park is also home to schools for both young and old. For the little ones you have Merryhill private school, which serves pre-schools through 5th grade, and nearby is Childtime Daycare Center. In the middle of Natomas Corporate is Kindercare Learning Center, another curriculum based daycare. So in terms of daycare, the Natomas Corporate definitely has you covered.

As to older students, you have two main offerings: Alliant International and New Horizons Computer Learning. Alliant in Sacramento offers mainly psychology and education classes. New Horizons offers IT training in everything from the basics (like Windows 7) to more complicated networks (Cisco Training).

There are also a few very inexpensive 80's style apartment buildings in the area. One bedrooms go for $700 and two for about $800.

My favorite part of this area, however, is the Natomas Racquetball Club with its nearly two dozen tennis courts and Olympic sized swimming pool.

Located just to the north of Discovery Park, Natomas Corporate has something for everyone.

Okay so it is Ranch house city around here—mostly of the run down variety. On average the southern part of the neighborhood, the median price of the homes is around $325K. These homes are not ugly or terribly small, but the neighborhood feels a little out of the mainstream of Napa somehow.

On the northern end and up in the hilly areas of the neighborhood there are several larger newer homes, some still being constructed. (Some which came to a fairly abrupt halt when the financial crisis hit.) On average the prices in the hills are closer to $650K and they seem much newer.

I can only guess, but it seems as if much of the newer construction here was hit fairly hard by the Recession and that may explain the partially built homes I saw in the area.

Silverado Middle School is the central school in the neighborhood. It is a middling school with so-so test scores—neither impressive nor horrible. Phillips Elementary in the neighborhood, however, is even worse, with tests scores indicating a school that is below average and that perhaps is not fully able to deal with the diversity of its students.

Overall this looks like a neighborhood that may do well in the future, but that currently feels rather stalled out.

This swath of land by the river is mostly just known as the home of Home Depot and Target. Those two big stores and a couple of satellite stores like Starbucks are basically all that is here.

On the northern end of this area there are a number of auto dealerships—Chevy, Nissan, Suburu; and some auto repair and smog shops.

As far as places to live, the only that I know of in this area is a trailer park named Valley Estates. It’s up on the northern end as well and looks about as decrepit as you can imagine.

Basically, this is a purely functional area where you only go if you have car needs or want to buy something for your home.

This southeastern area of Napa is all about three things: the college, the golf course, and the industrial area.

Although you may think of Napa as being wine growing 24/7, the 75,000 residents of Napa do have lives that are occasionally independent of the whole grape culture thing. One such sign of this is Napa Valley College. Napa Valley College is the local community college; it offers a variety of preparatory classes and two year programs for students.

Just south of the campus is one of the many Napa golf courses. There are so many golf courses in the area that this one is noteworthy only for being named after the city itself, although it is a perfectly passable golf course as far as I can tell.

To the south of the golf course is an industrial area filled with warehouses and non-touristy sorts of businesses like a granite supplier and a dental equipment supplier for the local area. There is also a large lot where refuse is piled, the local DMV, and even some non-descript wineries.

On the far southern end of the “neighborhood” (if we can even call this grab bag a “neighborhood”) is the Meritage Resort and Spa and another smaller college—Boston Reed College a career training institution.

Put simply, this is one of those areas that no one comes to visit on a wine tour (for the most part anyway) but that is necessary to keep the city going. It is the unseen gears of the machine which is Napa.

Central Napa is big enough that you could practically consider it to be three neighborhoods rather than one. For the most part Central Napa is a middle class neighborhood filled with older ranch style homes dating to the 1950’s. This gives the neighborhood somewhat of a rundown feel in spots.

At the same time this feels like the heart of the Napa. There are, for example at least a half dozen holy institutions here, from the Lutheran Church, Catholic parish and Jewish Temple.

There are also a number of schools here, including the very high rated New Technical High School and some private schools as well.

A number of businesses are also located in this neighborhood, including everything from mechanics to a pilates joint.

This is the place to go if you want to eat out in Napa whether you decide to go with super classy (and expensive) French restaurant like La Toque or just for some tacos at Tacos Michocan. There are a number of ethnic food restaurants here from Chinese to sushi to Italian (Oenotri). So you do not have to get out of Napa to find some quality dinner spots.

Napa is not particularly known for its nightlife, but there are some bars here beyond the wine bars that you might expect. You have Henry’s Cocktail Lounge here for example, Stone’s Sports Bar and Silo’s Wine and Jazz Club.

The neighborhood also exhibits a bit of variety on its southern end where homes have docks on the back and where home owners keep their motorboats.

And of course, one cannot leave this neighborhood without mentioning the Wine Train that has its station here. Overall, this is the active heart of Napa. Although catering mainly to tourists, the area does have a number of offerings for locals as well.

Slightly run down looking and very suburban, this neighborhood looks like it jumped out of 70’s movie. In terms of homes it is just about all 70s/80s style Ranch homes and tract housing of various kinds and qualities from those that look virtually identical to the trailer park style homes. You have nicely kept sidewalks throughout and the favorite automobile here is, without a doubt, the pick-up truck in all its larger manifestations.

The main drag is Jefferson and between it and the Trancas that forms the northern border of the neighborhood, you can find virtually all the amenities you expect from the suburbs—including just about every fast food place imaginable. KFC, Jack-In-the-Box, Sizzler, Pizza Hut, Taco Bell—they are all represented here.

Napa High School is in this area. Napa is a solid school serving a diverse community of students from multiple ethnic and economic backgrounds and doing a good job of it. Although not spectacular, Napa HS’s test scores are above average. They offer a full slate of AP courses, extracurricular activities and sports and they have good facilities. McPherson Elementary is also in this neighborhood.

Home prices in the area are on the lower end of the scale with the median around $350K and the high end around $550K. Very affordable though, as previously mentioned, the homes here are mostly uninspiring.

There is nothing particularly spectacular about this neighborhood. It is mostly just a lower middle-class suburban neighborhood like a thousand others in California. Most of the restaurants are chains that you can find anywhere else (except for Trancas Steakhouse which is okay) and the entertainment are about what you would expect in this kind of neighborhood. In other words, it’s just okay.

I suppose what gives it a rural feel is the picket fences that row some of the leafy streets and the windblown quality of the streets. It’s very quiet on a weekday here, though I’m sure you hear the kids playing in the yards during the weekends. There are also some newer houses sprinkled in here and there, but mostly it feels like the classic California neighborhood.

The southern end of the neighborhood is bordered by Tulocay Cemetery—which is as old as Napa itself, I think. The northern end of the neighborhood by the East Reservoir is considerably more woody and has the best views of the entire neighborhood and probably some of the best in Napa. Here and to the east as you head into the hills is where you are most likely to find the multi-million dollar homes. There is a beautiful Tuscan Villa up there, for example, which makes you feel as if you have been transported to Italy.

The average home price in the rest of the are--where homes are far more modest--seem to hover around the $600K range though occasionally one or two will drop down to ~$300K. On this part of the neighborhood near the cemetery few homes rise beyond the $1 Mil mark.

The central school here is Alta Heights Elementary, right in the middle of the neighborhood. It is an above average school according to test scores and seems to have strong community involvement as far as I can tell. There are a few churches in the neighborhood as well, including the Napa Korean Seventh Day Adventist Church and on the far northern border of the neighborhood, the Creekside Community Church.

Overall, this area has kind of classic California semi-suburban neighborhood feel of the kind those of us who are Gen-Xers remember from our childhoods. Basically it is the kind of middle class neighborhood you would like to raise kids in.

There are few places more beautiful along the California coastline than Morro Bay. The long, half-moon bay with the long strip of beach mostly walling it off is stunningly beautiful—so much so, that you might expect this to be the province of the fabulously rich. Morro Bay is protected from such intrusions however by its relatively remote location in Central California. This location does a fair amount to restrain the rise of property prices. In addition, because so many of the residents who live here are older and have settled roots in the area, the rise in property prices does not reflect the price at which they bought their homes. So even though the home they occupy may be currently valued at $600,000, back when they bought their homes they signed for not even a third as much.

That said, there is really no such thing as an inexpensive coastal town in California that doesn’t have something substantially off about it. Morro Bay doesn’t have a lot of renters—its mostly a tourist spot in the summer. People come here for the outdoors. But the residents are really more in the senior citizen range than anything else. Put simply, this place is nice for a visit, but year round this is a pretty dead location. Very foggy and sometimes just down right cold.

You could perhaps rent a place and go into San Luis Obispo, but then you might as well go farther south towards Santa Maria.

As far as things to do, there are some fairly bland seaside restaurants. The kind of places that serve fairly standard fare and don’t worry too much about wowing anyone with much more than the amazing seaside views. There is a sprawling golf course, kayak rentals and well-located natural history museum in an interesting building surrounded by Monterey cypresses.

Unfortunately, the northern end of the bay by Morro Bay State Park with its almost iconic stone mound, is marred by the stacks of some kind of power plant.

Morro Bay is made up of mix of hotels, older beach style homes and the occasional mobile home park. The hotels vary from beachside resort to the more traditional roadside motel. Many people end up here when tiring from Pacific Coast Highway on their way between SF and LA. (This is roughly the halfway point.) Some people also stop here before heading over to see William Randolph Heart’s Castle, San Simeon right off Cambria—this is just forty to fifty miles north of here.

The homes here all face towards the sea, of course, and the rising slope of Morro Bay makes it ideal for this kind of tiered setup. You can somewhat tell that some of the occupants are indeed wealthy by the luxury cars parked out front. This is not however the predominant level of income for most residents of Morro Bay. This is a fairly middle class area—although given the high number of retirees, statistics are more than a little bit misleading.

A portion of the residents live in pretty old looking mobile homes. They very much remind me of some of those 1970’s movies where old people retired to back in the day.

Overall, this is the kind of sleepy community that would be perfect for someone who wanted to get away from it all—say you wanted to write the next great American novel and while not being bothered.

Despite having become way too touristy, Solvang is still one of my favorite places to stop off when I am in this neck of the woods—which is usually only when I am headed up to the Bay Area. Solvang was founded as a Danish Colony and has capitalized on this European heritage by making their little town into a replica of the kind of place you might find on the outskirts of Copenhagen.

The main drag has everything made up as if you had just stepped into a Brueghel painting—lots of half timbering like you usually see on Tudor homes, those thatched, tiled roofs shaped like milk-made hats and, of course, purely decorative windmills. It is all, of course, more like Disneyland than Denmark, but it is at once wonderfully charming even as it is super-kitschy.

The theme is carried through everything from the parks—“Hans Christian Anderson Park”—to the theater, “Hamlet Theater.” There are a number of restaurants, bakeries and stores here as well. My favorite of these is the Cabernet Bistro. (Though for lunch you should head over to nearby Buellton and go to Anderson’s Pea Soup—it is our ritual to always stop off there whenever we go to SF.)

The time to go is in September when they have Danish Days. For a couple of weeks they give you as much Danish Culture—from stuffing your face contests, to milkmaids hoofing it in wooden clogs. It’s completely silly and ridiculous—kind of like a family friendly Oktoberfest (I know, I know! Oktoberfest is German).

The other attraction that often gets overshadowed is the Santa Ynez Mission, one of California’s 27 Mission Museums. If you are a fan of Spanish California, it is definitely worth checking out. And if growling hogs are more your speed, try the Classic Motorcycle Museum that is also in town.

So what is it like living it this little slice of Denmark by the Pacific? Solvang is a tiny town of barely 5,000 residents. It’s an older town, with the average resident being in their forties. These are mostly store owners and operators looking to capitalize on visiting tourists. When you get beyond the main drag, you leave the windmills and dormer windows behind, and you get a pretty straightforward So Cal town. In other words, its Ranch House city. Except for the occasional street name, this could be Chatsworth or Reseda in terms of appearance. On the western end of town you have Rancho Santa Ynez Estates—which is a pleasant, leafy mobile home park. (It is about as nice looking as a mobile home park gets but it is still a mobile home park nevertheless.) The nicest residential section of Solvang is on the northern hillside. It is still Ranch House city, but these are the larger Brady Bunch style Ranch Homes (though not split-level) with big yards, prairie fences and wide lanes.

Crime in Solvang is virtually non-existent. There has not been a murder here in more than a decade, rapes and violent crimes are about as rare as they get, and even petty theft is low. Rarely does the crime index break into the triple digits.

There is a hospital on the northern end of town (often a concern for country living) and supermarkets and auto repair shops. In other words, you have all of the basic amenities you need for suburban living in the 21st Century.

The local high school is Santa Ynez Union High in neighboring Santa Ynez. If test scores are a good indication, the school is ranked as high as any school around, getting an 850 API rank and having the majority of its students testing proficient on standardized tests.

Put simply, if you can find work in the area, this is a great place to live and raise kids (though I suspect the whole Danish thing probably gets old pretty fast).

West Beach in Santa Barbara is home to Santa Barbara City College—the local community colleg--and to the moderately well-known West Beach Music Festival. Santa Barbara City College, to begin, is more than just your regular community college. It really doesn’t have the feel of a community college at all. From its beach side location to the active nature of the students, you feel more like you are at a regular four year college than just your average 2-year. (There is definitely nothing “junior” about this college.)

The West Beach Music Festival is also a pretty good event. Happening right at the end of summer as people are just getting into the swing of things at school. Last year’s festival featured Rebelution, UB 40 and Bright Lights among others. It is a very Santa Barbara event.

Homes to the west of campus are pretty standard California fair: Ranch houses dating from the 1950’s for the most part. The streets are leafy and nice in a modest sort of way. It’s a good mix of students, young families and some older residents around here. With the beach so close, it should be prime territory for developers but the proximity of the college keeps them from rebuilding the whole place.

Overall, it is a pretty cool place to live and a great location for beach lovers.

Carpinteria is a tiny seaside town just to the southeast of Santa Barbara. When I was a teenager, I had a friend that would spend half her summer here and I would occasionally go along to make her company. Unlike a lot of seaside communities in So Cal, this is definitely not the domain of the super rich. Partly this is because of Carpinteria’s proximity to very unromantic Oxnard (ick, just the name is unpleasant off the tongue, “Ox” and “nard”). Partly this is because this has the feel of an older community—sort of your grandparents’ vacation town.

It’s really apartment city around here. Lots of boxy seventies style apartments and 80’s style town homes, but this is not like the kind of places you get in Manhattan Beach, where even though the apartments are small, you feel as if you are getting a cool, seaside flat. Here, if it were not for the weather and the not too distant sand, you would really not notice much difference from anywhere else. You could be in Van Nuys for all you know.

But, of course, the sound of the breakers, the drizzly beach weather and the shorts and flip flops dress code are a constant reminder of the nearby Pacific.

Although the year round population of Carpinteria is only 13,000, in the summertime it must double as all the people who keep their summer apartments here descend on the little coastal village. Catering to these vacationers are a number fairly square restaurants like Zookers and Sly’s Steakhouse. I am not putting them down. I actually like Sly’s—it is definitely the place to go for steak. I am only saying that they are not exactly cutting edge cuisine.

As to my favorite spots to go in Carpinteria, I would recommend The Spot—a beach town burger stand. Very yummy. As far as somewhere to go out for drinks, I would forego the better known Island Brewery in favor of The Palms and I have heard that Moondoggies is good for a kind of beach dive bar vibe, but have no first hand experience of said lunar poaches.

In terms of safety, locals often warn about there being gangs in the area both from Oxnard and from Santa Barbara. They also warn not to be taken in by the bucolic beach setting. This may be the case, but the crimes statistics for Carpinteria don’t seem to validate their claims. The overall crime rate in Carpinateria is about a third of the national average and murders and other violent crime are relatively rare. There is some property crime but it is not that significant.

The local schools also get a pretty bad rap with a lot of locals sending their kids to private school as they hit middle and high school because they consider Carpentiria High School a recruiting ground for local gangs. Supposedly there are a lot of fights and such at these schools. Again, however, the objective statistics don’t seem to paint such a bleak picture. CHS’s API score for example, ranks it just above average as far as California schools are concerned. Its STAR tests give a similar impression with students testing just slightly above average in all subjects except for science where they fall off precipitously for reasons I can’t explain.

Put simply, I don’t know whether the apprehension I have heard regarding gangs in the area is not just a reflection of fears having to do with the diversity of the city (Carpinteria is roughly half white and half Hispanic).

My read on it is that this is a great, affordable place to live, whose main problem/blessing is that it is too far away from the really main urban areas to draw on those who would drive rent and property prices up. I would certainly not mind living near the beach like this.

Even today, when people here the name “Watts” they still think of the 1960’s riots that set the city ablaze. Even the 1990’s Rodney King riots have not wiped away the shadow of those events. But is Watts today still an urban ghetto?

Unfortunately, Watts is now not much different than it was fifty years ago—not in terms of socio-economic status, anyway. Though now this is a predominantly Latino neighborhood. This is the forth poorest neighborhood in all of LA, with only Chinatown, Downtown and University Park coming in lower. It is a densely packed neighborhood as well, with about 17,000 people per square mile.

Homes of this flat grid of a neighborhood take on the typical look of urban poverty, Los Angeles style: small homes on small lots, fenced yards and barred windows, trash strewn streets bordering unkept lawns.

Even worse is the fact the fact that more than a quarter of the population growing up in these conditions is under the age of 10—that’s more than 10,000 kids born into a world of high crime and limited opportunity.

Crime is just as bad now as it ever was. If you just look at the last six months, you find that there have been close to 400 violent crimes, including 8 murders. That puts it in the top ten most violent neighborhoods in all of LA. Since 2007, Watts has been the site of some 65 murders—mostly having to do with gang violence. When you take into account that one in four residents is under 10 years of age and that the vast majority of murder victims are at least in their teen years if not older—that means that the average Watts resident of adult years has a 1 in 1500 chance of being murdered on any given year. Pretty scary.

With the exception of King Drew Medical High School and a few others, the educational system also offers little chance of escape from a cycle of poverty. I say King Drew because although it is far from a great school it does offer some glimmers of hope. Though it missed 7 of its No Child Left Behind standards last year, it did manage to get half of its students to pass the STAR test in English and the SAT scores for its graduates are only about 100 points below the state average. That said, it has long way to go in terms of math where only 1 in 5 test proficient.

Overall, however, this is definitely not where anyone would choose to raise a family if given another option.