El Monte

The El Monte neighborhood to the southeast of the Concord BART is another one of these large sprawling Concord suburban neighborhoods. The central features that mark the neighborhood are:

--The Loma Vista Adult Center on the neighborhood’s western end.
--The Canal Trail that bisects the neighborhood north-south. (A great place to go for a jog.)
--The Concord Community Park on the eastern end of neighborhood. (It has a community pool and tennis courts—it is a fairly large park.)

This is a typical Ranch home neighborhood that seems to mostly date from the 1950’s from the appearance of the homes. These are not the larger kind of Ranch homes that remain stylish perennially. These are the smaller kind of Ranch homes you often come across in the west—kind of worn out looking.

My favorite part of this neighborhood though is the little Eichler house mini-neighborhood on the far eastern end of El Monte.
These are the really nicely kept kind of Eichler homes that those who live in Palo Alto may be familiar with—the kind of home in which Steve Jobs grew-up. (I don’t think this is wholly incidental—if ever there was a kind of home that makes you self-conscious about design it is the flat roofed, open spaced Eichler home built with a sort of minimalist aesthetic that makes it stand out rather than blend in.)

This neighborhood has really been slammed by the foreclosure crisis, with more than 90% of the homes here for sale due to foreclosure. This fact, no doubt, has a big drag on home prices for El Monte. The median home price here is only $275 K with prices ranging from as low as $85 K to only about $400 K on the high end.

One of the other problems with this neighborhood for families with kids is that the schools are just not very good. From El
Monte Elementary to Olympic High these are average and below average schools.

You are fairly close to the Downtown area and the BART station so you are well-situated for commuting or for getting yourself to a movie or shopping.

I am not sure what crime is like for this area, but I assume that like most of Concord it is about average.