Professorville

You don’t have to be an academic type to move into Palo Alto’s Professorville – but it certainly wouldn’t hurt.

The tiny neighborhood, which sits between Kingsley and Addison avenues and Cowper and Ramona streets, welcomed its first homes in 1889 when Stanford University professors who preferred to own their own land began building there.

An official historic district with beautiful foliage, the neighborhood boasts 100-plus-year-old homes in a variety of styles, including Dutch Colonial, Colonial Revival, and Craftsman.

Professorville is an extremely pedestrian-friendly area that is just an easy walk or bike ride from downtown Palo Alto, the Town & Country Village shopping center, and the Palo Alto Caltrain station. Residents enjoy access to an array of restaurants, stores, and entertainment nearby.

Neighborhood children attend the highly ranked Palo Alto Unified School District, which received a 2013 state Academic Performance Index score of 932 out of 1,000.

Of course, living in an extremely desirable neighborhood in a city that’s among Silicon Valley’s hottest real estate markets will cost you. The median price of Professorville homes for sale averaged $3.18 million for the period between November 2012 and November 2013, according to MLS data. During that same time period, the median home price in Palo Alto overall averaged $2.07 million.

The only drawback to the peaceful neighborhood is perhaps its marked lack of street parking during the day, thanks to commuters who leave their cars on its tree-lined streets and then head downtown or to Stanford University.

Aptly named, Professorville was once settled by Stanford University professors during the college’s first few years of existence. As years followed, new homes were being built by incoming professors, becoming a much more densely populated area as Stanford University began to expand and redevelop. Now, the district is a flourishing Palo Alto community dominated by that same traditional aesthetic, but with a variety of new homeowners. Geographically speaking, the neighborhood is very small, spanning about ten square blocks or 0.1 square miles of exclusive residential terrain. Its total population barely exceeds 600, of which is mostly white (about 80%).

For prospective residents, Professorville is a flat neighborhood that sits within the spectrum of middle to upper middle-class. The area tends to be saturated with old Dutch Colonials and Tudor Revivals, most of which were built within the 1930’s. These homes are blended between one and two-stories in size. They provide comfortable porches, sizable front lawns with neatly trimmed hedges and properties that are consistently larger than most Palo Alto communities. As for the price tag, average estimated listings are around $1.5 million, while some have been known to sell upwards of $2.6 million. Those that live within the area typically rake in around an annual income of $140,000.

Professorville has a lot of amenities. For one, its close proximity to downtown Palo Alto and Stanford University make it prime real-estate. Of the latter, residents feel relatively connected to Stanford’s rich culture and weekly on-campus activities (sports events, etc.). The neighborhood is also just down the street from the Palo Alto Caltrain, a commuting option that easily connects residents to San Francisco and San Jose. For young students, the Palo Alto Unified School District always performs high on API scores across the board. Students in the area usually attend Addison Elementary, Jordan Middle School and Palo Alto High School.

With its turn of the 19th Century homes and streets named after famous Americans (Melville, Whitman, Lincoln are some of the east west streets; north-south you get Brits like Cowper, Webster and Byron), Professorville is one of those quaint historic neighborhoods that seems better suited to the Ivy League than the West Coast.

The leafy streets fronting the large homes have a pleasant and quiet feeling. The homes—like Copeland House, Angell House and Nathan House—are old classic homes themselves and examples of Colonial Revival and early Craftsman style homes.

Of course, finding a place to live here and doing so at an affordable price is pretty impossible. Given its proximity to campus, the beautiful vintage homes and high cost of Palo Alto to begin with, Professorville is pretty impossible as a real estate market.

Not to mention that you are also so close to Downtown Palo Alto that you can walk to a great restaurant, or go to a Hookah bar, or work out at the gym.

St. Anne’s Chapel, with its Spanish Revival style architecture is also here so you can also attend midnight mass without getting in your car.

And, as in other parts of Palo Alto, it goes without saying that the schools here are just amazing.

Professorville is the kind of neighborhood that makes the world feel like a quiet orderly place where ideas can be mulled over in the quiet of your sitting room, or perhaps in your library while your butler refills your tea cup—though I’m really not sure what kind of professor can afford to live here. Certainly no one from the adjunct faculty.