If someone asks me to describe Burlingame in one sentence, I usually say this: it's a very good midpoint. That's honestly how I've thought about it for the 20 years I've lived here. Close to San Francisco, close to the airport, close to Silicon Valley, and close to my family. My husband Andrew was actually the one who found this little quaint neighborhood. I'd lived up and down the Peninsula from San Jose all the way to San Francisco, and I never thought I'd end up here. And then we got here, and we never left.
What sold me wasn't a feature on a listing sheet. It was the walkability. I came from a place where a car was a necessity for everything, and Burlingame gave us the option to walk. That sounds small until you live it. On any given weekend I can walk to Basecamp for a workout, or up into the Hillsborough hills with a girlfriend, or down Burlingame Ave to try a new restaurant. On Sunday mornings, we walk to the local donut shop Royal Donut Shop for breakfast. And on any given weekend it's only a 20 minute Uber ride into the city. That's not a brochure line, that's actually my weekend.
The day-to-day flow here is easy. I take the kids to school, pack lunches, do my calendar, see clients, pick the kids up, and run to sports. And because downtown is right there, half of my day happens on foot. The community builds itself around that walkability. You run into the same neighbors at the farmer's market, at the coffee shop, at the rec center. When I'm coming back from an open house on a Sunday, I'll stop on Burlingame Ave and see three people I know before I get to my car. After a while you stop calling that a coincidence and you start calling it a neighborhood.
Something I've noticed moving through different parts of the Bay Area: Burlingame has evolved, and evolved well. We didn't lose what made the downtown feel like a town, but we gained trendy restaurants, stores, a redone courtyard, better parks. Although, we miss you Nini's Cafe! That's not always how this goes as there are plenty of Peninsula cities have either frozen in place or changed so fast they lost their character. Burlingame threaded that needle, and you feel the payoff every week.
Now, I tell every buyer the honest side too, because that's how I work. Burlingame is on the higher end of the price points even by Peninsula standards. Some streets sit under SFO flight paths and some don't but it's really block-by-block, not a city-wide thing. A lot of our housing stock is older, so you're budgeting for older plumbing, older electrical, older foundations or just overall upgrades. Lot sizes in the flats are modest, so if a big yard is a must, we're probably looking at the hills or into Hillsborough. None of that is a dealbreaker, but I'd rather you know it before you fall in love with a house than after. That's how I'd want an agent to treat me, so it's how I treat my clients.
What's kept me here isn't any one feature. It's the community my kids built here, the friends we've made, my neighbors, the proximity to family. That's the thing you can't see on Zillow, and it's the thing that makes people stay.