Living in San Mateo

Neighborhoods — The corridor

North Central

Small lots, older duplexes, the city's deepest bench of taquerias, and more households per acre than anywhere else in San Mateo.

A North Central street at dusk with parked cars filling both curbs the whole way down the block, under a heavy run of utility poles and overhead wires, the sky going orange behind
Both curbs, the whole block, most nights. The wires are the other tell: nothing here was laid out with room to put them anywhere else.

On the map

On the slope

Elevation cross section of San Mateo, west to east: the Crystal Springs watershed at 560 feet falls to San Francisco Bay at sea level in roughly four miles. San Mateo Highlands — 310 ft Laurelwood & Sugarloaf — 330 ft Baywood — 130 ft Aragon — 90 ft North Central — 38 ft Downtown — 28 ft Hillsdale — 22 ft Bay Meadows — 14 ft Sunnybrae — 11 ft Shoreview & Fiesta Gardens — 8 ft Coyote Point & North Shoreview — 5 ft
The hills On the corridor, just north of downtown. The Bay Drag toward the Bay →
Elevation
38 ft
Band
The corridor
Nearest platform
San Mateo
Getting to it
5–12 minutes
Street pattern
A tight grid of numbered and named blocks
Fog
Rarely, and it burns off first
Tree canopy
Thin — small lots, few street trees, little shade on the grid
Noise
Caltrain horn, El Camino traffic, sirens on the corridor

North Central runs north from downtown along the El Camino side of the tracks, and it is where San Mateo's working history still shows. The lots are small, the housing stock is a mix of 1920s bungalows, postwar duplexes, and apartment buildings from every decade since, and the population per acre is the highest in the city.

The cheap food is the reason people cross town for dinner — taquerias, pupuserías, Filipino and Peruvian counters, panaderías that are out of the good stuff by afternoon. The North Central Neighborhood Association is one of the more active in town, and the community garden and the neighborhood center are used rather than ceremonial.

What it's actually like

Urban by Peninsula standards. Street parking is contested. Trains and the occasional siren carry. A train, a grocery store, a laundromat, and four restaurants are all reachable on foot without crossing a highway, which is not true of most of San Mateo.

The housing is older, which means charm and also knob-and-tube, single-pane windows, and foundations that predate any code still on the books. Rentals here are among the more affordable in the city — a relative claim on the Peninsula, and a real one.

Getting out

On foot, second only to downtown. A train, a grocery store, a laundromat, and four restaurants are reachable without crossing a highway, which is not true of most of San Mateo. El Camino is the exception and the constant: anything on its far side means a signal and a wait.

By train, the San Mateo platform is walkable from most of the neighborhood — five to twelve minutes depending on the block.

By bike, flat and close-grained, with a grid fine enough that there is almost always a quieter parallel street. The El Camino crossings are the whole route-planning problem.

By car, driving north on El Camino at 8am is a slow way to start a day; the on-ramp to 101 at Peninsula is usually faster. Street parking is contested and the permit rules vary by block.