Oakland

Oakland is really a collection of districts that each behave like their own small town, which is why buying here means choosing a neighborhood far more than choosing a city. Lake Merritt — a tidal lagoon and the country’s oldest official wildlife refuge — sits in the middle of downtown, and second-growth redwoods stand in the hills twenty minutes above it.

Why people move here

• Transit depth. Eight BART stations, Amtrak at Jack London Square, and the ferry to San Francisco. West Oakland is a single stop from Embarcadero.
• Parkland at scale. Redwood Regional Park and Joaquin Miller Park hold real redwood forest inside the city; the Lake Merritt loop is 3.4 miles around.
• Restored theatres and museums — the Paramount and the Fox downtown, the Grand Lake by the lake, and the Oakland Museum of California.
• Architecture that changes district to district, from Victorians in the flats to 1920s brown shingle and mid-century construction in the hills.

Neighborhoods

Rockridge runs along College Avenue with its own BART station. Temescal sits below it around Telegraph. Grand Lake wraps the eastern side of the lake around the Grand Lake Theatre. Montclair is up in the hills with a small village center of its own.

One local note worth having early: Piedmont is a separate city, entirely surrounded by Oakland, with its own schools and its own government. Two addresses a block apart can sit in different cities.