East Palo Alto Apartments
East Palo Alto Apartment Listings
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).
