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What Is It Like Living in Palo Alto, California? Walk down Addison Avenue in Professorville and you’ll pass a small garage at number 367. Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard incorporated HP there in 1939. California calls it the birthplace of Silicon Valley. It’s just a garage — but that’s kind of the point. Stanford has been a neighbor since 1891. Google started in a campus dorm room. The list keeps going: Yahoo, Cisco, NVIDIA, PayPal. History didn’t happen near Palo Alto. It happened in it. People who move here expecting a typical Silicon Valley suburb are usually caught off guard by the downtown. University Avenue has independent bookstores. Real ones — staff picks on the shelves, not algorithms. California Avenue runs a Sunday farmers market year-round, draws maybe 60 vendors, and feels nothing like a corporate park dressed up as a neighborhood. About 67,000 people live here. Two Caltrain stations. A school district that parents across the Bay Area research before they’ve even listed their current home. Real estate is expensive for reasons that are obvious once you’re standing on University at noon on a Tuesday. Sand Hill Road cuts through the city’s southern edge into Menlo Park. Sequoia, Kleiner Perkins, Andreessen Horowitz — these firms funded the companies your phone runs on, and they’re all within a few miles of each other. Stanford Research Park sits on Page Mill Road with 150+ tenants. The density of money, ideas, and talent within a few square miles of downtown Palo Alto is, by most objective measures, unmatched anywhere on earth. That’s not marketing. It’s why buyers keep showing up. Browse all Palo Alto homes for sale or see our full guide to Silicon Valley communities we serve.