by Mary Pope-Handy | Jun 15, 2022 | Local History, Evergreen (SJ), Foothill Areas, Neighborhood descriptions, Neighborhoods, Senior Living
Nestled in the rolling foothills of San Jose’s southeastern Evergreen area is a hidden gem known simply as the Villages.
As you drive up to the secured entrance, you’ll spot a sign: The Villages a Country Club Community. They take that claim to heart. A gated, community-oriented neighborhood centered around numerous country club amenities creates an immersive home for its residents. However this is a senior community, so to live at the Villages you have to be 55 or older (also known as an adult community or seniors community). Therefore many residents are retirees who are active, love entertaining guests, and don’t want to mow the lawn every week. But you don’t have to be a resident to enjoy the country club side of things.
The Villages
Only about a 20 minute drive from downtown San Jose, this area was once agricultural land with vineyards. It is still home to the impressive William Wehner historic mansion, constructed in 1888 and designed by architect David Burnham (this estate is currently closed to the public). The mansion is sometimes called the Cribari Mansion for its later owners, a name that was adopted by the first Village development. The original stone columns (circa 1891) for the estate’s original drive still stand as a prominent feature on one of the golf courses.
Today, the community is still surrounded by untouched rolling hills. And that natural beauty is staying put, as the Villages owns 550 acres of open space with community hiking trails. (more…)
by Mary Pope-Handy | Sep 5, 2021 | Selling Tips, Senior Living
Whether it’s called downsizing or rightsizing, if you are deciding to downsize you’ll want to start by considering a few basic questions.
- What are the main goals with selling your current home and moving to something smaller?
- Do you want less to maintain (home, yard, both?)
- Are the reasons primarily economic? (i.e., smaller home is less expensive to heat, cool, maintain, or cash out , or sell to get rid of the mortgage, or something else)
- Would you prefer to stay close to where you live now, or to relocate?
- What kind of living space would be ideal for your next home? Do you want a yard or patio? Do you want to be in a seniors community? Would you prefer more rural or more urban than what you have currently?
Deciding to downsize can be for people in many different decades of their lives
Some people drastically change their house or move somewhere smaller (or more remote / less expensive) the moment the youngest child has packed up and gone away to college. They may be in their 50s or 60s and still relatively young, working, and saving for retirement. I’ve seen people sell in Los Altos, Saratoga, and Cupertino to economically downsize to Almaden or nearby areas when they no longer wanted to pay to live in a more expensive school district.
Others keep the “family home” as long as possible. My grandparents moved many times in their lives due to my grandfather’s military career, but in their retirement years they enjoyed a large home with room for everyone to visit – and we all did. They were 90 and 92 when they moved from their 5 bedroom house at Pasatiempo in Santa Cruz to Dominican Oaks, a retirement community just a few miles from there. At their ages, more help was needed. (For my grandmother, moving to a community was wonderful socially, as she wasn’t still driving at 90.)
If you are deciding to downsize, you could be at either of these ends of the spectrum, or you could be anywhere in between. It’s a huge gamut and there’s no “one size fits all” or one “right answer” with this topic.
What makes you consider rightsizing?
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by Clair Handy | May 1, 2021 | Eichler & mid-century modern, Home Types, Houses, Mid Century, Ranch, Senior Living, Single Family Homes
Love it or hate it, you can’t escape it: the Ranch.
By far the most abundant architectural style among Silicon Valley homes is the ranch. A recent resurgence in interest in this unique and pervasive house design suggest it is regaining popularity, and there are plenty of reasons to love it! Here we’ll take a peek at the history, how to identify, and the function behind the ranch design. Ready to meet America’s dream home?
by the National Plan Service, Inc (1956) on Archive.org – Click to see
Back on the Ranch: A Brief History
In the early 1930s, San Diego designer Cliff May took the architectural world by storm with his spin on the Spanish colonial revival home. Inspired by adobe ranchos and modern design with an emphasis on comfortable California living, May developed this unique style. This soon evolved into the quintessential California ranch style.
It’s no surprise that the ranch has come to be known as a suburban style. Its popularity was widespread during the booming post-war years through the 1970s, peaking in the 1950s with ranch homes accounting for as many as 9 out of 10 new homes! (Witold Rybczynski, p 207)
Having saturated the market for decades, and with buyers wanting bigger homes, the market shifted away from building the sprawling single-story ranch in the later decades of the 20th century. Still the design retained popularity in the resale market. With more ranch homes celebrating their golden jubilee (some of the earliest are approaching 90) and some gaining historic designations there has been a renewed interest in ranch architecture over the last decade or so.
Design Elements
“Today, almost any house that provides for an informal type of living and is not definitely marked by unmistakable style symbols is called a ranch house.” (Sunset Western Ranch Houses (1946), IX – 1946).
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by Mary Pope-Handy | Jun 10, 2020 | Selling Tips, Senior Living
Interested in moving your property tax basis when you sell your current home and buy the next one? For those over 55 in California, this is a great one time option.
There are actually two propositions involved. Prop 60 applies to moves within your own county, and Prop 90 relates to moves between counties which are participating in the transfer arrangement. Unfortunately, of California’s 58 counties, only 10 have the cooperative agreement to accept a property tax basis transfer from other participating counties.
Cooperating Property Tax Basis Transfer Counties (Prop 90)
The counties cooperating in the property tax basis transfer are only these, as of the date of this posting: Alameda, Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino, San Diego, San Mateo, Santa Clara, Tuolumne, and Ventura.
Some of the basics for the property tax basis transfer:
- Homeowners must be 55 and older at the time of sale of the original property.
- Homeowner must be on record both for the home that’s sold and the replacement property.
- The replacement residence must be equal to or lesser in value than the original residence.
- There are special rules for multi-family (duplex, triplex, fourplex) properties and for mobile homes.
In the most typical scenario, a senior homeowner would sell a house (or townhome or condo) and “downsize” to another, less expensive, smaller house or condo. If the homeowner had been in the first property for a very long time, then the low tax rate would be hard to give up, but Props 60 and 90 enable that homeowner to go to another, less expensive home and carry the old tax rate along – one time, and either in the home county or in one of the participating counties.
I have known seniors to sell a house in Los Gatos, Saratoga or San Jose and move to The Villages or to gated senior communities out of the area but closer to their grown kids and make use of these two propositions.
It should be noted that while the price of the replacement home must be less than the home being sold, that doesn’t mean that the new home must be smaller. I’ve known people to move out of area and get a larger, newer, nicer home – at a lower price tag. So it’s really an economic downsizing (or “right sizing” as some like to say now).
For more information and to get all the details, please click on the California state page for these two propositions.
by Mary Pope-Handy | Jan 10, 2019 | Almaden Valley (SJ), Selling Tips, Senior Living
For retirees or senior home owners in Almaden who’ve been in their houses a very long time, the prospect of selling that beloved San Jose home can be quite daunting. The longer you’ve been there, the more memories you’ve created and most of the time the harder it is to decide to sell and then do all the work needed to maximize that decision. This article is intended as a help for Almaden senior home sellers, their families and friends.
In today’s post we’ll go over the decision to sell the home (or not), the timing elements for selling and getting help in doing so.
Deciding it’s time to sell your Almaden Valley home
Perhaps the biggest hurdle is not the physical work involved with preparing a home for the real estate market or moving, but instead is the difficult decision of whether or not to move (and if so, when to do it).
As people age, there are a lot of losses. There may be retirement that wasn’t chosen, but forced. Loved ones pass away. Vision diminishes. It may become necessary to limit driving, or worse, give it up altogether. It is not hard for those over 65, 70 or 80 years of age to feel like it’s one unhappy challenge after the next. There’s a lot of change but it’s not all positive.
The prospect of also changing one’s residence can seem like one of the biggest, toughest and most unwelcome of all. (more…)
by Mary Pope-Handy | Nov 11, 2014 | Selling Tips, Senior Living
One of the hardest things that adult children must sometimes do is to assist their parents in downsizing. Most of the time, this means also getting the parent(s) to agree to sell the home, perhaps also to move into a seniors facility (independent living, assisted living, skilled nursing, memory care) or perhaps to move in with one of the adult kids. Very often, leaving the house also means leaving a good deal of memories and perhaps independence. It can be terribly difficult for everyone involved.
Sometimes our older family members can live at their own home until they die, which is what they want and what makes everyone happy. It may also be the most economical thing to do. As they age, there are services which can come to them (gardening, cleaning, meals being prepared or dropped off, errands being run, driving services provided when reflexes slow or eyes fail). One company has invented a medicine dispenser which is timed and will alert family members if the meds aren’t taken! It may be good to utilize some sort of safety device in case there’s a fall. If you can get all the bases covered, it can be close to worry free for everyone. In those cases, perhaps worrying about real estate can wait.
For others, though, either medical needs or social needs drive the change to a place with many other seniors. For some, this infusion of new friends can be an emotional lifeline that greatly improves the quality of life. Particularly for those who lose the ability to drive and move about independently, a transition to a seniors facility can mean a reconnecting with others which was lost due to lack of independence. I have seen that with some of my own relatives. Or when a beloved spouse dies, sometimes the loneliness is compounded by remaining in the same home and being mostly alone. A move can be a big help, and the companionship of others is no small part of it. (more…)
by Mary Pope-Handy | Dec 19, 2013 | photos, Saratoga, Senior Living
When I was 13 years old, my parents moved from Santa Clara to Saratoga, where our newly built George Day home had been constructed against a pastoral backdrop of orchards plus one small horse ranch directly behind us. In winter, when many trees lost their leaves, we could see past Fruitvale Avenue and glimpse the towers of the old Odd Fellows Home. I always wondered what that was about and who those odd fellows were who seemed to retire there, in that stately old building away from the main drag. It was a mystery to me.
Today that same campus is home to the Saratoga Retirement Community, a continuing care facility. The International Order of Odd Fellows still owns this senior living site, but it’s managed by Pacific Retirement Services. Best of all, it is open to everyone, and you don’t need to be a member of the IOOF to live there. And, in fact, in the early 2000s my grandfather rented an apartment in the Assisted Living area for a few years – and loved it. That was before the Manor House was totally rehabbed and again the pinnacle of the community. (more…)
by Mary Pope-Handy | Oct 29, 2013 | Condos & Townhomes, photos, Relocation, San Jose (all areas), Senior Living, West San Jose
A newer “mixed use” neighborhood in San Jose, Santana Row is popular with people of all ages and interests. It is not just a “shopping center”, but is really a community, one which offers a wide variety of dining, shopping and entertainment, suitable for all kinds of budgets too. Best of all, it’s right in the heart of Silicon Valley.
Dining at Santana Row varies from very formal and expensive to casual and snack-like, and the type of food available ranges widely too. A fairly new addition is Pinkberry, which seems to be growing quickly in popularity. There are about thirty cafes, bistros and restaurants and to date I’ve probably visited about one-third of them – all experiences positive.
Entertainment at SR goes beyond window shopping and includes live music and, of course, films at the movie theater. Many chose to simply peoplewatch, take in a good book or catch a game of chess with a friend while enjoying a beverage. A Farmer’s Market features produce, flowers and other goods each week (and there’s a Safeway just a block or two away also) and is a good excuse to browse the offerings. Or maybe splurge a little and enjoy some pampering at a spa or salon: Santana Row’s got that, too.
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by Mary Pope-Handy | Jul 20, 2013 | Almaden Valley (SJ), Alum Rock, Alviso (SJ), Berryessa (SJ), Blossom Valley (SJ), Buying Tips, Cambrian Park (SJ), Cupertino, Evergreen (SJ), Foothill Areas, Local History, Los Altos, Los Altos Hills, Los Gatos, Los Gatos Mountains, Milpitas, Monte Sereno, Palo Alto, Relocation, Renter tips, Rose Garden area, San Francisco Bay Area, Santa Cruz, Santa Teresa (SJ), Saratoga, Senior Living, Willow Glen (SJ)
If you arrived into Silicon Valley via Highway 101, driving south from San Francisco, you might believe that the Santa Clara Valley, the San Jose area and Silicon Valley as a whole has got to seem to be the ugliest place on earth. Although heavily traveled, that is not the “scenic route”.
So, too, if you are looking for a place to live and are groping to find a place that is reasonably priced, fairly safe and not a terrible commute distance. You might not even have “is nice looking” on your wish list. You might not think it’s possible if all you ever see are the ugly concrete tilt-up buildings in north San Jose, Santa Clara, Alviso, or anywhere along the 237 corridor. That area is an architectural wasteland.
Let me assure you: there are a lot of beautiful places in Silicon Valley where you can rent or buy a home. But how do you find them? It helps a lot to have a local give you a few pointers. I’ll give you some tips today on finding a scenic place to live.
Hills – An easy way to find a scenic location to make your home is to settle near the hills, especially those in the west valley (the Santa Cruz Mountains or the Coastal Range) as they are green year-round. Communities at the base of the west valley foothills include, in Santa Clara County, Palo Alto, Los Altos, Los Altos Hills, Cupertino, Saratoga, Monte Sereno, Los Gatos, and the Almaden Valley area of San Jose. All of these areas are adjacent to the hills or mountains and offer far better than average schools (many of them qualify as great – compare costs between these areas). (more…)
by Mary Pope-Handy | Jun 12, 2013 | Senior Living
Now that many home owners in Silicon Valley have equity again, the possibility of selling and moving has opened up once more. Seniors have special needs and in many cases could use a little extra help. Here are a few resources:
AARP.com – this is the # 1 advocacy group for seniors and this website has a tremendous wealth of information.
AgeInPlace.com – find info on creating a safe environment that’s easier to live in, plus monitoring services.
MoveSeniors.com – a resource for downsizing, moving and remodeling plus other helpful avenues.
RetirementHomes.com – a senior living directory for North America (from independent living to assisted to memory care and nursing).
SilverPlanet.com – help with “aging in place” options and more.
TheSeniorList.com – ratings and review site for a wide range of sernior services and living arrangements.
As a Seniors Real Estate Specialist, I enjoy working with and assisting seniors. Please call me for help with seniors selling (or buying) homes anywhere in Silicon Valley!
