How to find an affordable neighborhood with good schools??

We live in Maxwell Park, for 1.5 years,  and love it.  We paid under one million for our place since it's on the edge of the neighborhood and not remodeled. Our block is super close with people knowing each other's names,  a mix of new people and folks who have lived here for decades and everyone looks out for each other. There's a mix of professional and more working class and some retired people.  Variety in racial and ethnic backgrounds. Maxwell Park itself is a long walk or short drive for us and works well as a neighborhood park with a playground. It's also easy to go hiking in the hills for us after a short drive. There's an active neighborhood association that takes on some great projects.

For schools, Horace Mann, the elementary school we're zoned for, is supposed to close at the end of the year. I'm not sure what the new neighborhood school will be.  We were interested in Spanish immersion for our kids and there are several nearby so we never looked into the neighborhood option. Though our middle child did get speech therapy at Horace Mann last year and it was excellent.  But our elementary school is only a 5 minute drive away which is very reasonable. The other two families in our block with elementary school students also send their kid to a (different) Spanish immersion option and to an out of neighborhood school were they felt like they got better special needs support.

For us Maxwell Park has been a great fit. 

This is the unfortunate thing about living in the Bay Area. The homes are extremely expensive and the schools are very bad. We moved a year ago and were trying to buy a house in Castro Valley because the public schools are pretty good there but even offering well above asking prices we were being over bid by $300K every time. For houses that were just kind of basic, nothing special. So I realized that we need to just buy a house that we like in a neighborhood that we are OK with and feel safe in and just come to terms with the fact that we will have to send our kids to private school. The cost per year for our 2 kids to go to private school versus the amount we would have paid to live in a good school district is still less. We moved to San Leandro and our street is quiet (what I was looking for) and our house is big enough for all of us to be comfortable and happy. We spent about $300K less than we would have in Castro Valley and I like that our neighborhood is flat so the kids can ride bikes and scooters and stuff when they get older. 

I'm interested to see if anyone here can recommend an area with houses for less than a million with good schools because I could not find that myself. I'd love to know if that even exists! I'll move there too! ;)

Good luck to you and your family!

Hello! Curious-are you open to Alameda? We were facing a similar challenge last year and growing very frustrated. The West End has a number of new townhomes being developed that are less than $1M. We toured several and they are very nice! And, the West End is great-ferry, Encinal beach, and breweries are walkable, and there’s lots of options with Alameda schools. There’s also lots of great playgrounds. We ended up buying in a co-op in a community called Woodstock and have been really happy with the area. Good luck with your search!

We live in Maxwell Park and love it here ( have a 3yr and 5 month old), we also house hunted in San Leandro and Oakland. There’s friendly neighbors in MP, lots of families, active neighborhood FB and Buy Nothing Group, halloween block party, and the Get Goes coffee truck on Friday mornings! Also conveniently near the freeway and Laurel District. I can’t speak to the public schools yet, but there’s lots of preschool and daycare options. In San Leandro we also liked the Broadmoor, Estudillo, and Assumption Parish neighborhoods too, but I haven’t watched their house prices lately.