How close is too close? For people house hunting in Silicon Valley, the quality of local public schools is often a huge priority – in fact, it’s something that most home buyers insist upon even if they intend to enroll their kids in a parochial or other private school. Similarly, most home buyers do not want to purchase a house, townhome or condo that’s too close to high voltage power lines. Sometimes it’s just a “resale issue” to them, but other times they have health concerns and not just real estate home value concerns.
But what about the relationship between public schools and these high voltage power lines? If your child will be at school 35 hours a week for 9 months of the year, should that be a concern, too? So far, only two of my buyers have made that a criteria – and when they did, it became apparent that most of the schools in the border areas of Los Gatos, Cambrian and Almaden were going to be eliminated.
A couple of years back, I mapped out the high voltage power lines using Google Maps (click on link to view it). This morning I added a few public schools to it in a “layer”. This is not comprehensive, as I only mapped a few in these three areas mentioned already in this article. For the named schools, many are directly adjacent to the lines (Alta Vista, Union, Leigh, Noddin) usually on the far side of the playing field) and the furthest is about 1/5 of a mile from them (Carlton).
