Ventura, Palo Alto

Not to be confused with the SoCal city of the same name, Ventura in Palo Alto is one of the more student friendly areas with a pretty strong commercial section as well.

Let’s start with the commercial section. On the northeast end of Ventura is a commercial area anchored by the offices of Cloudera, some kind of “enterprise software firm” devoted to “Apache based Hadoop software and services.” I am quoting because I have no idea what that means. I assume from their name that they also do some kind of cloud computing, or because they have their head in the clouds, I really don’t know. I do know that another company in the area is Danger, Inc—part of Microsoft—which is best known for “Sidekick” some kind of cloud storage app which notoriously lost users data a couple of years ago.

Another company in Ventura is Playdom, a social media game maker in the style of Zynga, which as far as I can tell seems to make knock-offs of popular games like Civilization for social media. (Their version is City of Wonder.)

This location also seems to have a high percentage of auto shops with at least a half dozen that I counted, and a bunch of stores as well, including the Teak Patio, Kelly Moore Paints, Mike’s Bikes and Gryphon Stringed Instruments (which has great, though pricy guitars and also offers lessons—don’t forget we are in Grateful Dead territory here).

Of course, whenever you get this many businesses packed into one location, you will also find a number of restaurants looking to feed at the economic troth as well. Thus, for those who don’t want to head up to the Mecca of S. California Avenue where great iconoclastic restaurants abound, there is Hunan Garden, Baja Fresh, Boston Market and probably my favorite in Ventura, the pricy Straits Café—a Singaporean fusion restaurant.

With all this business on its northern end, you should not overlook that Ventura also has a residential area on its southern end that is largely made up of older Ranch and Mission Revival style bungalows dating from the mid to early 20th century by all appearances.

What does it cost to live here?

A one bedroom around here will run you about $1550 around here—which was too expensive for us, but is relatively affordable by Palo Alto standards, which explains why we know of at least two other students from my program that found homes here.

It’s a nice spot—relatively close to campus and with stuff to do nearby (including the Cinearts movie theater). I can certainly understand why it is so popular among students.

When I made my long trip to California Palo Alto was on my list of stops. The city overall is amazing very fun and exciting with plenty to do. This section of the city was my favorite though. Although rather expensive the area is beautiful and very enjoyable. I enjoyed the restaurants and shops here was well as the many other attractions such as night life. Overall ventura is a great vacation spot to visit when in California. Although it can be a little loud so im not sure id want to live here. This made a great vacation spot but even putting the price aside I think living here would be too much for me to handle I like to relax a lot.