Menlo Park, California

Menlo Park is an idyllic, leafy, suburban town. It’s filled with families (mostly) and a bazillion dogs all quietly going about their business on the peaceful, winding, tree-lined streets amidst the beautiful homes and parks throughout town. If you have been living in San Francisco or Los Angeles or New York or any chaotic city and craving a chill experience for you and your kiddos then Menlo Park is the ticket.

With peace and quiet can come a relatively snoozy lifestyle. Menlo Park has little to do socially and so locals caution those considering moving here to steer clear if they crave a lot of local fun. Next door Palo Alto has a substantial commercial district if you want to live mid-peninsula but be a short walk to restaurants and bars. Since Menlo Park is the home of the headquarters of Meta/Facebook there are always plenty of young professionals considering and then often rejecting Menlo Park in favor of Palo Alto or Mountain View or even more often, San Francisco.

As noted this is mostly a family-focused suburban town. There isn’t much to do although there are a growing number of restaurants along El Camino and Santa Cruz Ave. What people like about the Menlo Park lifestyle isn’t the nightlife, it’s the dozens of parks, with picnic areas, off-leash areas for doggos, playgrounds, tennis courts (pickleball on the rise!), skateboard areas and lots of general open space for the kiddos to play. It’s the excellent schools, great youth sports and tons extra-curricular programs that move people to love living here.

Plenty of people live here though, not because of what they can do in Menlo Park, but rather because it is incredibly convenient for getting to many of the local tech companies, particularly Facebook but also Google and any number of the other big players. It’s also just 30 minutes up to San Francisco or down to San Jose. There’s a Caltrain stop here if you want to skip driving and there’s a shuttle service running throughout the city to downtown Menlo and downtown Palo Alto.