Our Town: The Devil's in details Our Town: The Devil's in details (January 14, 2004)

by Carol Blitzer

It's the little things that count. That's a lesson I've learned since our latest issue of Palo Alto Neighborhoods was distributed in January.

Now in its third rendition, the Neighborhoods booklet offers detailed insights into 28 different areas of town, including comments from both longtime and newer residents, nearby community resources and data on home prices in the neighborhood.

We've already started work on next year's version: We are inviting comment from our readers so we can update the next booklet and fix anything that we might have missed the first, second or third times around.

The ink was barely dry before the letters, calls and e-mails started flowing in.

Some comments were complimentary and acknowledged the mass of work that producing Neighborhoods entails. Others simply pointed out how, once more, we'd missed the boat on their area.

One longtime resident referred to internal inconsistencies between our large, color map on page 7 and the individual neighborhood maps. He even noted that one street is included in two different neighborhoods, while his street is included in none.

Another was concerned that we ran a photo of a non-Eichler home in the largely Eichler Greenmeadow neighborhood. And one felt that by running a profile written three years earlier the news was sadly out of date, even though it was updated each year.

Clearly, some readers pay close attention -- and we appreciate that. As a direct result of one letter, we'll be exploring further this year to see if Walter Hays Drive should be in Community Center or the Duveneck/St. Francis neighborhood (or split down the middle, by sides of the street).

Our readers have pointed to the real challenge of presenting this booklet each year: Very few agree about exactly what the boundaries of their neighborhoods are, or just what the boundaries mean.

One repercussion of neighborhood boundaries is house prices: If a house on Walter Hays Drive is in Community Center, where the median home price is $915,000, is it worth more than if it is in Duveneck/St. Francis, where the median is $849,500?

Gathering information about house prices has been one of our greatest challenges. Again, because of a reader comment, we're revisiting how we obtain this information, seeking a more accurate and dependable method. The numbers for 2003 seem to have under-estimated the median home prices in some neighborhoods. That is because sophisticated home-sellers know how to protect their privacy and bury their sales information. The result is the higher-end sales often don't appear on lists of sales recorded in the counties so the overall average is lower than actual sales.

Last Saturday, I met with residents of a 29th neighborhood in Palo Alto -- Monroe Park. Located at the southern end of Palo Alto immediately east of El Camino Real, Monroe Park has the distinction of being the only place in town where the addresses are Palo Alto but their schools are Los Altos.

This means a Palo Alto child goes to Los Altos schools but is a "non-resident" for after-school activities of the Los Altos Recreation Department, often unable to participate with school-mates and friends.

Another anomaly is attending an especially wealthy Los Altos elementary school. Some children have come home asking if they were "poor" -- including one child living in a four-bedroom, two-bath Palo Alto home with a pool.

Despite the inequities, residents I spoke with have no intention of moving out of Palo Alto. They simply could not think of a better place to live, even with its warts (such as increasing traffic).

Although we've just published the latest version of Palo Alto Neighborhoods, we're already well into the next one. This edition will soon be posted on the Weekly's community Web site: www.PaloAltoOnline.com, so updates and corrections can make the online version current without having to wait until the next version a year from now.

Anyone who's caught an inconsistency -- or finds a missing creek or street -- may call or e-mail. Neighborhoods is a work in progress, and it's the sum of the little things that makes it worth doing.

Carol Blitzer is an assistant editor for the Weekly. She can be e-mailed at cblitzer@paweekly.com.

E-mail a friend a link to this story.