Featured Apartment:
San Jose-East Palo Alto - 1 bedroom - 1 bath - spacious, clean & sunny unit! - Brick Building - Hardwood Floors - Modern Kitchen - Spacious Living Room - Large Bedroom w/ Double Sliding Door Closet - Updated Bathroom - Off Street Parking - access to commuter rail, bus, shops & restaurants, first and last months rent View More Listings -->
East Palo Alto Information
East Palo Alto (often called EPA) is a city in San Mateo County, California,
United States. As of the 2000 census, the city population was 29,506 (31,915:
2003 estimate). It is situated on the San Francisco Peninsula, roughly halfway
between the cities of San Francisco and San Jose. To the east is the San
Francisco Bay, and to the west the prosperous city of Palo Alto. While East Palo
Alto is still widely assumed to be part of the city of Palo Alto, it has always
been a separate entity from Palo Alto, even before it became incorporated as a
city, with an entirely different demographic makeup. Though the two cities are
separated only by San Francisquito Creek, they are worlds apart culturally and
economically. (Although they are in different counties, East Palo Alto and Palo
Alto share both telephone area codes and postal ZIP codes.)
Although half of East Palo Alto's residents were African Americans in 1990,
Latinos quickly moved in and now form about three-fifths of the total
population, while the proportion of African Americans has dwindled to about 20%.
A sizeable Pacific Islander population also resides in East Palo Alto, including
Tongans and Samoans.
East Palo Alto has an unenviable reputation for crime and poverty, a reputation
well deserved during the 1980s and early 1990s (in 1992, the city had the
highest per-capita murder rate in the country with 42 murders). Since then the
city's crime problems have somewhat subsided, although the prosperity which
lavished the Silicon Valley during the dot-com boom of the late 1990s largely
by-passed East Palo Alto. The Ravenswood City School District, which serves East
Palo Alto and part of adjoining Menlo Park, has struggled with low academic
performance and allegedly corrupt leadership. Eventually, however, the
Peninsula's shortage of land and soaring property prices meant that even East
Palo Alto became an option for urban regeneration. Until recently, East Palo
Alto has been spared gentrification.
East Palo Alto also includes a small piece of land across the Bayshore Freeway
from the shopping center, a roughly triangular area between Highway 101 and the
San Francisquito Creek, which includes a former two-block-long retail business
district known as Whiskey Gulch. (The name dates back to the time that Stanford
University, in Palo Alto to the west, was dry and prohibited alcohol sales
within a radius of one mile from the campus: Whiskey Gulch was just outside the
limits, and was home to a number of liquor stores and bars.) The city has torn
down Whiskey Gulch and replaced it with the University Circle office complex. A
200-room Four Seasons hotel opened in University Circle in 2006 after numerous
delays to serve the Silicon Valley market. The new hotel is being promoted as
the most lavish and luxurious full-sized hotel available in the mid-Peninsula
and West Valley area, but has had problems with settling into the bay landfill
onto which it has been built (evidence of which was not noticed until windows
built for it would not fit into their panes).
Beginning in the 1990s, a few white people started to trickle back in, mostly
because real-estate prices elsewhere in Silicon Valley were too high for most
people who weren't executives and stock-option millionaires.
Significant gentrification occurred in East Palo Alto from around 2000, with the
construction of a large shopping center named Ravenswood 101 (including branches
of Home Depot and Best Buy, and a controversial IKEA store) and several upscale
housing communities (intended for high-earning Silicon Valley workers). This
gentrification has faced opposition from local residents. Some residents charge
that it serves to price locals out of one of the region's only affordable
communities while providing only low-paying jobs in the retail developments and
consuming an increasing proportion of the tiny city's land area (2.5 square
miles).
Some Things to Consider When Looking for an Apartment...
When searching for a new apartment make sure to take your time to think
through what are the most important things to you in an apartment and plan your
search based on those priorities. Here are some things to consider when planning
your move:
1. Consider the areas where you would like to live
* What is the crime rate?
* If you have children - what rating does the local school system have?
* Is there area convenient shopping, health and recreation services in the area?
2. Make a list of your housing priorities
* Do you have pets?
* Do you need parking?
* Do you need to be on the ground floor?
* What amenities are important to you - swimming pool, fitness room, in unit
laundry?
3. Evaluate the building
* What is the condition of the unit and building?
* Are the grounds maintained?
* Are windows, steps, and railings in good condition?
* View the property at night. Is it safe and well lit?
4. The security of the property
* Are there security service? When is the guard on duty?
* Does the building have controlled access?
* Does each unit have secure door and window locks?
5. Talk to the neighbors
* Ask other residents whether they are satisfied with the building.
6. Amenities
* Who is allowed to use the amenities?
* When are they open?
* Are the fees charged to use those facilities included in rent?
7. Ask about Utilities
* Does the owner or tenant pay the utility bills?
* Are any utilities included with monthly rent?
* Do units have separate thermostats to control heat and air conditioning?
8. Review the lease
* How much notice must you give before moving out?
* Can the rent be increased? If so, by how much and how often?
* Are pets allowed?
* What is the security deposit and cleaning costs upon move out?
* What is the responsibility of tenants for damage to property?
* Is there a penalty for breaking a lease?
9. Information too bring to a lease signing
* Credit Report
* Pay stubs/tax returns
* Reference
* Application
More Apartment Information
An apartment (or flat in Britain and most other Commonwealth countries) is a
self-contained housing unit that occupies only part of a building. Apartments
may be owned (by an owner-occupier) or rented (by tenants).
Some apartment-dwellers own their apartments, either as co-ops, in which the
residents own shares of a corporation that owns the building or development; or
in condominiums, whose residents own their apartments and share ownership of the
public spaces. Most apartments are in buildings designed for the purpose, but
large older houses are sometimes divided into apartments. The word apartment
connotes a residential unit or section in a building. Apartment building owners,
lessors, or managers often use the more general word units to refer to
apartments. Units can be used to refer to rental business suites as well as
residential apartments. When there is no tenant occupying an apartment, the
lessor is said to have a vacancy. For apartment lessors, each vacancy represents
a loss of income from rent-paying tenants for the time the apartment is vacant
(i.e., unoccupied). Lessors' objectives are often to minimize the vacancy rate
for their units. The owner of the apartment typically transfers possession to
the occupant by giving him/her the key to the apartment entrance door and any
other keys need to live there, such as a common key to the building or any other
common areas, and an individual unit mailbox key. When the occupant move out,
these keys should typically be returned to the owner.
Apartments can be classified into several types. Studio, efficiency, bed-sit, or
bachelor apartments tend to be the smallest apartments with the cheapest rents
in a given area. These kinds of apartment usually consist mainly of a large room
which is the living, dining, and bedroom combined. There are usually kitchen
facilities as part of this central room, but the bathroom is its own smaller
separate room. Moving up from the efficiencies are one-bedroom apartments where
one bedroom is a separate room from the rest of the apartment. Then there are
two-bedroom, three-bedroom, etc. apartments. Small apartments often have only
one entrance/exit. Large apartments often have two entrances/exits, perhaps a
door in the front and another in the back. Depending on the building design, the
entrance/exit doors may be directly to the outside or to a common area inside,
such as a hallway. Depending on location, apartments may be available for rent
furnished with furniture or unfurnished into which a tenant usually moves in
with his/her own furniture. Permanent carpeting is often included in an
apartment.
Laundry facilities are usually kept in a separate area accessible to all the
tenants in the building. Depending on when the building was built and the design
of the building, utilities such as water, heating, and electric may be common
for all the apartments in the building or separate for each apartment and billed
separately to each tenant (however, many areas in the US have ruled it illegal
to split a water bill among all the tenants, especially if a pool is on the
premises). Outlets for connection to telephones are typically included in
apartments. Telephone service is optional and is practically always billed
separately from the rent payments. Cable television and similar amenities are
extra also. Parking space, air conditioner, and extra storage space may or may
not be included with an apartment. Rental leases often limit the maximum number
of people who can reside in each apartment. On or around the ground floor of the
apartment building, a series of mailboxes are typically kept in a location
accessible to the public and, thus, to the letter-carrier too. Every unit
typically gets its own mailbox with individual keys to it. Some very large
apartment buildings with a full-time staff may take mail from the mailman and
provide mail-sorting service. Near the mailboxes or some other location
accessible by outsiders, there may be a buzzer (equivalent to a doorbell) for
each individual unit. In smaller apartment buildings such as two- or
three-flats, or even four-flats, garbage is often disposed of in trash
containers similar to those used at houses. In larger buildings, garbage is
often collected in a common trash bin or dumpster. For cleanliness or minimizing
noise, many lessors will place restrictions on tenants regarding keeping pets in
an apartment.
In some parts of the world, the word apartment is used generally to refer to a
new purpose-built self-contained residential unit in a building, whereas the
word flat means a converted self-contained unit in an older building. An
industrial, warehouse, or commercial space converted to an apartment is commonly
called a loft.
When part of a house is converted for the ostensible use of a landlord's family
member, the unit may be known as an in-law apartment or granny flat, though
these (sometimes illegally) created units are often occupied by ordinary renters
rather than family members. In Canada these suites are commonly located in the
basements of houses and are therefore normally called basement suites.
Staying in privately owned apartments rather than in a hotel is quickly becoming
popular with travelers.