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Comment by Rhapso | Hacker News Reader

I'm looking at moving to the bay area in the next few months. I've settled on fremont but im looking at renting. Assuming rent linearly correlates with the costs here it does not seem that bad a cost or commute (relatively speaking). Any advice or cautions?

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I would love to see a similar chart with median 1BR rental prices instead.

Do you have kids of a school going age or will be in school in the next few years? That makes a huge difference as far as SV is concerned. Fremont is one of the better school districts in CA second only to the Cupertino school district. Correspondingly prices in Fremont are quite high.

If schools are not an issue then you have a lot more options in terms of cost.

The next issue is prevalence of crime/safety. Fremont is a very safe place to live, but as you go along the BART corridor there are variations in this factor.

If you don't mind endless daily commutes then you can also look beyond the Pleasanton/Dublin corridor where there are good schools coming up with relatively affordable home prices.

The Dublin/Pleasanton school situation is considerably better than in Fremont -- and always have been along with the rest of the 680 corridor bedroom communities.

Fremont schools are a very mixed bag and while they've improved recently thanks to gentrification they're not fantastic historically. There are still quite a few moderately poor schools mixed in the Fremont district.

For your comparison:

http://www.greatschools.org/california/pleasanton/pleasanton...

http://www.greatschools.org/california/fremont/fremont-unifi...

School and housing is better site than great schools.

http://www.schoolandhousing.com/mobile/

Mission San Jose in Fremont is one of the top 10 public schools in terms of API & SAT in the state of CA.

http://schools.latimes.com/sat-scores/ranking/page/1/

Yes, like I said it's a mixed bag. Mission San Jose has very high scores but others like JFK High aren't great.

Unlike Fremont, all schools in Pleasanton have excellent scores. There is no concern of rolling up into the wrong schools depending on where you live, availability, etc.

There's a lot of variation in Fremont neighborhoods from sketchy to super-wealthy, so it depends on what you can afford, whether schools matter to you, what you want to be near, etc.

Definitely consider proximity to transit: the current surge in employment has lead to a surge in traffic jams. The three main transit systems are BART, Trains (Ace and Amtrak Capitol Corridor), and the Dumbarton Express bus.

Feel free to ask followups -- I'm a born-and-raised.

Oakland

Fremont is an Indian ghetto.

A lot of the non-Indian people that I have talked to mentioned a desire to move because of that, especially Chinese friends.

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