San Jose Area questions (Sunnyvale, Santa Clara: condo, how much, house)

[tonyman]

My wife and I want to relocate to the San Jose in about a year or so. She is looking for a job in the tech field and I'm looking in the Environmental/Natural Resources field. We don't really care where we work in the area, but want to live in a nice "smaller" city, where the population is small (not huge like SJ), somwhere friendly where we can drive a short distance to shopping, food, and play. We don't have kids and will be looking for a small house or condo. Anywhere come to mind?

[mstnghu2]

Your post is a bit vague. Without info about where you'd be working or what you're looking to pay, etc. it's somewhat hard to give good information.
There are plenty of smaller cities in the San Jose area, but they're all attached to each other so they don't feel small. The populations within the city limits might technically be smaller, but since every city runs right into another, you'll still feel like you're in a highly populated area. There are 15 actual incorporated cities/towns in Santa Clara county and many of their borders touch San Jose at some point.
The only places that really come to mind as feeling smaller are the city of Morgan Hill, the unincorporated community of San Martin and the city of Gilroy. They are south of San Jose and have a much more rural and unpopulated feel to them. They are also farther from out from most of the jobs in the Silicon Valley area. You would have to drive to San Jose for most entertainment, shopping, etc.
There are also towns like Scott's Valley, Ben Lomond, etc. in the Santa Cruz mountains, but they're also somewhat out of the way and not the most easily accesible.
To put it in perspective, if you're driving north on hwy. 101, once you get to Gilroy is basically the beginning of the Bay Area. You will be in a sprawling metropolis all the way to S.F. and the population doesn't start to thin out until you head past the Golden Gate into Marin county, so trying to find a small town in the immediate Bay Area isn't the easiest thing to do.
There are sparcely populated areas on the fringes of the Bay Area, but they don't meet your other criteria.

[silverkris]

I think you should first consider the employment or job before you jump into potential locations. Have you targeted any potential employers there? Do you have an idea about how much the going rate for salaries?

That way, you have a baseline in terms of budget. You do know that the Silicon Valley area is one of the most expensive areas of the country to live in, correct?

From there, you can determine where/how convenient you need to be in terms of your residence to location of employment.

[Luke9686]

Although it has a large population, San Jose is a small city. Very suburban, sprawl, strip malls, etc. You could drive from San Jose through Santa Clara, Sunnyvale, and Cupertino and it all looks the same.

[sonarrat]

Originally Posted by Luke9686

Although it has a large population, San Jose is a small city. Very suburban, sprawl, strip malls, etc. You could drive from San Jose through Santa Clara, Sunnyvale, and Cupertino and it all looks the same.

Not true at all. Maybe if you're on I-280 driving through you could think they were all the same, but each of those places has its own character, ups and downs.

For example, Santa Clara has its own city-run power plant. The city has also done a good job of building residential and commercial areas mixed in with the major job centers, unlike San Jose or Mountain View which have them in completely separate areas, which results in infuriating commute patterns.

Sunnyvale is a rather balkanized place; east of 101 is trailer parks and horrendously shoddy old stick-built things along with many of the job centers, from there to El Camino is a mixed area with a lot in common with Santa Clara, and then west of El Camino you have very desirable areas that have Cupertino schools but also rather nasty traffic patterns.

Cupertino is a city that, in 1980, was 93% white. Now it's majority Asian, and it's still a city in transition. The schools are world-famous for their academic rigor. Apple dominates several blocks of De Anza Blvd. In the hills, you have multi-million dollar estates that rival those in tony areas like Saratoga or Los Altos.

[bigdumbgod]

Originally Posted by Luke9686

Although it has a large population, San Jose is a small city. Very suburban, sprawl, strip malls, etc. You could drive from San Jose through Santa Clara, Sunnyvale, and Cupertino and it all looks the same.

Subtlety apparently not the strong suit in this assessment.

And San Jose is the 10th largest city in the U.S.A.

[BayAreaHillbilly]

Originally Posted by tonyman

My wife and I want to relocate to the San Jose in about a year or so. She is looking for a job in the tech field and I'm looking in the Environmental/Natural Resources field. We don't really care where we work in the area, but want to live in a nice "smaller" city, where the population is small (not huge like SJ), somwhere friendly where we can drive a short distance to shopping, food, and play. We don't have kids and will be looking for a small house or condo. Anywhere come to mind?

Take LA. Cut it in half. Reshape it and ring a bay with it, allowing the overflow to spill into the intermontaine valleys nearby.

This is the Bay Area. A continuous conurbation from the tip of SF, to the edge of development in South San Jose, then on up the East Bay to just past Richmond. Every nearby flat valley within a certain radius of the connurbation I've described is also mostly developed. There are 8 million here (you need to ignore the government stats, they artificially split the Bay Area into separate Metros, even though there are no physical gaps other than mountains and highlands separating the satellites from the main bayside connurbation).

[80skeys]

Originally Posted by tonyman

My wife and I want to relocate to the San Jose in about a year or so. She is looking for a job in the tech field and I'm looking in the Environmental/Natural Resources field. We don't really care where we work in the area, but want to live in a nice "smaller" city, where the population is small (not huge like SJ), somwhere friendly where we can drive a short distance to shopping, food, and play. We don't have kids and will be looking for a small house or condo. Anywhere come to mind?

Any of the town up and down the Peninsula. Have a look at:

• Sunnyvale
• Mountain View
• Cupertino
• Palo Alto

[AllenSJC]

Sunnyvale or Mountain View.

[Joy74]

Milpitas