Livermore advice badly needed! (Fortuna: crime, how much, house)

[jcizek75]

My wife and I are considering moving to Livermore and would like to know if James St is a safe area. Any feedback would be greatly appreciated. Thank you for you time.

[EDRN911]

Personally, I would consider almost all of Livermore safe. Having lived here for the past 6 months, I really have yet to find any areas of the city "dangerous." Crime happens everywhere, it just happens to occur more frequently to people who involve themselves in that sort of lifestyle. I wouldn't hesitate to move there based on safety alone.
However, I do believe that Marilyn elementary school is the assigned school to that area, and that some of the API scores are lower than other Livermore elementary schools. Not sure if you have children, or how much that matters to you.

[jcizek75]

EDRN911, thank you for your response. Fortunately, our children are both grown up and living on their own so schools are no longer a concern. We are just a middle aged couple looking for a nice area to live in that is reasonably close to my new job in the East Bay.

Again, thank you for the response. I greatly appreciate the info you provided!

[jcizek75]

I would like to clarify my question. It appears as though James St may be either a part of or very close to the Sureno gang in Livermore. Please let me know if this is true or now.

[justinbro2002]

We bought our house right around the corner from James st 4 years ago we looked at a house on James st and bought the same model home on a different street. This area of town does have a large Latino population and there are some gangs around but by and large they keep to themselves and any violence is usually directed towards rival gangs. We have had some petty crimes in the 4 years we have lived here. The side mirror was stolen off of my wifes SUV parked in front of our house. Someone stole a pair of flip-flops of of our porch and left their ugly pair. We think someone stole our mail so I installed a mail slot on our garage door and installed cameras. But it really isn't that bad here We lived on the "good" side of town before by lab and someone broke into my car so you don't know. But where else can you find a 4 bedroom 2 bath house in the bay area for under $500k anymore. Livermore is a fairly safe city and we love it here. My wife has a friend who also lives on James st and she loves it the biggest problem we have is finding street parking because some of the neighbors around here have 15 people living in the homes and have a lot of cars. But Latinos aren't they only people who have a lot of people living in one house the Asians and middle easterners also tend to have multi-generational multi-family households and anywhere in the bay area you are going to run into this.

[phantompilot]

I would advise you to stay away from that general vicinity. There are just too many low-income, low-class people there for my comfort level. In terms of personal violence, it might not be unsafe per se, but because there are a concentration of poor/lower class Mexican immigrants...you get lots of drug and property crime. Lots of quality of life stuff. My take is that part of town will not gentrify for a long time, if ever. I bought into an investment partnership out in Livermore with some friends who live there and we did our due diligence on all of the opportunities and came to the conclusion we should try to focus on the right side of the tracks (literally, its that "northside" of downtown that seems to have most of the issues).

And to answer your question, YES, that area is gang central. If you want proof call the police department and ask for the records officer, explain your reason for asking (That you are considering moving there) and you would like to get a "call for service" map and an incident map for the area.

The crimes maps only go back six months online, but if you can get any cop to talk candidly they will tell you its the worst neighborhood in the city. Livermore Web - Community Crime Trends

The best parts of town for a couple without kids would be south of first street for walkability to downtown area - or anywhere in south livermore if you don't really care about downtown walkability. The side of town north of 580 is also mostly ok (Springtown).