Duveneck / St. Francis

Duveneck, also known as St. Francis, is a lush green, middle-class Palo Alto community nestled against US Route 101. It stretches about 0.5 square miles of highly dense residential terrain, but it is within minutes of the San Francisco peninsula. For the most part, the neighborhood is saturated with quiet neighborhood streets, single-story homes and leafy residential aesthetics. Demographically speaking, the community is largely white (over 75%) with a total population of over 2,500.

Duveneck’s residential quarters offer some slightly more affordable residences than most other Palo Alto communities. For the perspective resident, there are a couple modern-looking homes tucked away between the more traditional, ranch-style homes. But even the older homes have been revamped with a second story or extended to the edge of its properties. These homes tend to be situated towards the northern end of the community. As for their properties, they are mostly shallow, but are usually elegantly maintained with trimmed lawns and primped bushes. For numbers sake, median house listings are around $1.3 million, slightly below average for Palo Alto. Moreover, the typical household income is an unassuming $185,000/year.

If you’re looking to live within Palo Alto, you can’t really go wrong with Duveneck. The area is saturated with orderly streets, pleasant greenery/foliage and bushy oak trees lining the street. Its also one of the more convenient city neighborhoods with US Route 101 edging the neighborhood. The highway makes commuting to San Jose and parts of San Francisco of relative ease. And for the young families, St. Francis students have a variety of outstanding private and public schools to work with.

This is one of many neighborhoods in Palo Alto that is home to the super rich, though I’m not sure if the neighborhood would deserve these extraordinarily high rents if it were not in Palo Alto. The homes here are those flat roofed homes with exposed beams that were super popular in the 1950’s and early 60’s for whatever reason. (I’m not sure if they were just a variation off the
Ranch home or maybe even of the Prairie style home, though when I went to look them up I could not find ones that exactly matched. Maybe even Alexander style homes?)

There are also a lot of the really nice versions of Ranch homes with wooden shingle roofs, perfectly trimmed hedges and brick/stone walkways--very leafy and bucolic in a very suburban sort of way.

They’re nice, but I’m really not sure they deserve the million plus dollar asking price many of them carry.

If you are the private jet type, then the proximity of the Palo Alto Airport might be a draw to the area since it is just to the east.

There really isn’t much more to this neighborhood. There are a couple of mediocre restaurants, and strip mall and Highway 101, but really sort of pricey for what it is. Of course, you can’t beat the proximity to the Stanford and Silicon Valley but I still think it is overpriced—not nearly as attractive as other neighborhoods in Palo Alto as far as I am concerned, anyway.