San Carlos, California

Laurel Street is the wonderful but also relatively mellow commercial street in San Carlos. It smacks of small-town USA with its boutique shopping, restaurants and coffee shops. You can find cities in the surrounding area with bigger and fancier downtowns (see Palo Alto and Menlo Park) but few as calm and fun as this. One note: the outdoor seating and restaurant scene blew up a bit in the recent times, bringing a more jumping vibe to the area. Some locals are pushing to shutdown the outdoor shenanigans in favor of a return to a quieter, slower pace.

It’s hard for these more chill towns near Palo Alto and Menlo Park not to become them as fancier folk move in and buy out some of the historically blue collar population. When your media home price is north of $2m it can’t entirely maintain its character and San Carlos feels on the verge of losing that balance of socio-economic diversity that made it a more reasonable place to raise your kiddos.

San Carlos is for sure a family town. Most of the housing is single-family although there are some condos/townhomes and apartments near downtown and up on Crestview for those looking for something smaller (albeit not inexpensive). Much of the community gathers on Laurel Street (downtown) and Burton Park for a pretty active social calendar that includes an annual parade, weekend markets, a wide variety of fairs including an Art and Wine Faire, outdoor family camp-outs, summer concert series, and movies nights under the starts. There is also a ton of volunteering opportunities offered through the City Council Volunteer group. It’s a close-knit town that also has a ton of youth sports and community activities for the kiddos. If you want your beans to be busy this town will serve you well.