Convenient to Good Samaritan Hospital, Carlton Elementary School and freeway access to highways 17 and 85, the beautiful “King Street” neighborhood in San Jose’s Cambrian Park district seems to be close to everything.  But a drive through the tree-lined streets with tidy homes seems like a relaxing step into the welcoming neighborhoods of yesteryear rather than the hustle and bustle of today’s Silicon Valley. 

As with the nearby Alta Vista neighborhood, homes here show a pride of ownership not found everywhere.  Holidays include beautiful displays of lights that invite neighbors out to tour after dark. Many home owners wrap the trunk of the trees between the sidewalk and street with blankets of white lights, making for a stunning look down the road.

The “King Streets” enjoy an uncommon appeal that makes homes here perennially desireable to home buyers. The popularity of the area is due partly to the convenience factor (easy to get to a great elementary school with high API scores, easy to get to the freeways, Los Gatos and Good Sam) and the beauty or neighborhood charm factor. It is a winning combination for this west valley community! Many who wish to live in Los Gatos choose this part of San Jose because it’s on the border, so it is not uncommon for the King Streets to be a first home and the move up one is in Los Gatos.

View “The King Streets” in a larger map

What are these houses like? Built in about 1959 or 1960, homes in the King Streets (Kingbrook, Kingdale, Kingridge, Kinghurst, Kingwood, Kingfield plus Lost Oaks and part of Elester) began as small 3 bed, 2 bath ranch style homes of about 1100 to 1600 square feet on lots that are usually about 6100 square feet (but it ranges from 5100 SF to about 7000 SF lots). They were built with hardwood floors in most of the home, an attached two car garage and in most cases, a kitchen which faces the front yard or street.

Some of the homes are still very original…

Many are updated though, and may even look “new”.

Frequently, the small ranch homes have been enlarged too.

Common changes & improvements to these Garcia-built homes:

The “bones” are great in these homes but they’re not hard to alter if you need to do some reconfiguring or adding on. The most frequent change I’ve seen is taking a little space from one of the large secondary (or “kid”) bedrooms and converting it to space in or a closet for the Master Bedroom since in many of these floorplans, the secondary bedroom is later than the owner’s room. Another often seen improvement is adding a family room off the living room and behind the garage. Finally, in recent years the trend is toward more “open space” or “great room” feel, so many new home buyers in this neighborhood open up the kitchen to the living and dining areas to create that openness which is popular now. The King Street homes are often livable as is or even nicer if expanded.

What does it cost to buy a home in the King Street area of Cambrian?

Compared to the rest of Cambrian Park or the 95124 zip code, this subdivision is a little more expensive than the average Cambrian home because of its close proximity to Los Gatos (it is very close to the Los Gatos border) and the beauty of the area with so many gorgeous trees.

One of the 3 bed, 2 bath homes with the original square footage will probably run around $700,000 to $750,000 in today’s market if it is somewhat updated, which is the condition we typically see. The larger homes will sell for anywhere from the high seven hundred to the low eight hundreds (possibly a little more) depending on condition, size, lot size, etc. And of course if you happen to find a short sale or bank owned home in there, or a home with a lot of deferred maintenance, it will be less, somewhere in the 600s.

Call me to learn more about this great neighborhood today!

CC & Rs are “Covenants, Conditions and Restrictions“  (sometimes “Covenants, Codes & Restrictions).  They are a set of rules drawn up for a neighborhood or subdivision by the builder or by a board comprised of the builder and a few others who want to set the neighborhood standards to keep property values up.

The C, C & Rs  are put in place, usually for a set number of years such as for 30 or 35 years, and most of the homes in Silicon Valley do have CC & Rs and most of them are now expired.   It’s always for a finite period of time, though usually extendable if the neighbors vote it in again (which I have never seen done), but sometimes gauged by something perhaps not so predictible.  The weirdest time line I ever saw referenced something like “until the death of the last living great grandchild of…” and it mentioned one of the Kennedys. Odd, but apparently legit.

What are the CC & Rs about?

Here’s a peek at part of one -

Usually the CC & Rs dictate the minimum size of a home (e.g., the home must be at least “X” number of square feet)  that may be built in the subdivision, the setbacks (homes must be so many feet from the street and property lines), what kind of signage may appear (only for sale and for rent signs, for instance), and normally there’s a restriction on farm animals so that people may not raise goats, sheep, chickens and so on in their backyards or breed animals professionally.

Many years ago, some C, C & Rs also had restrictions on who might buy or live in a neighborhood (racial, religious and other restrictions).  This is illegal today, of course, and so the first page of any C C and R document you see now will have a large disclaimer stating that any fair housing violations are illegal and are null & void. Since the C C & Rs “run with the property”, they supposedly cannot be amended (though I have never been convinced that they couldn’t be – just that the government chooses to require the disclaimer instead).

Do the C C & Rs matter?

For the most part, they are irrelevant because in most of Santa Clara County, they have long since expired.

They can be a little helpful, though, as sometimes the setbacks (which may still be enforceable) may be stated more clearly than in the preliminary title report or elsewhere.

Often, too, they hide some historically interesting tidbits. Today I read the C C & Rs for a Leep built home (a very good builder of tract housing in the Santa Clara Valley) in the Cambrian Park area of San Jose.  I know that there’s an area of Campbell (that has a Los Gatos mailing address) with Leep homes;  one street in this area near the Saratoga and Los Gatos border is named Elwood and another Bearden. Today I learned that there were two builders of these homes, Elwood J. Leep and Leonard Bearden, Sr. So that was a fun tidbit – I have sold many “Leep homes” over the years, have known them to be well built but never had the builders’ first names before.

To summarize, in most cases, the C C & Rs won’t provide you with a lot of helpful information, but do try to obtain them anyway when buying a home in Santa Clara County. There may be information that is interesting, if not necessarily useful – and you never know, there may be a tidbit of helpful information buried in there along with the strange admonitions that homes not cost less than $10,000 when sold. That’s the least of our worries today!