South of Midtown, Palo Alto Homes for sale, recent sales and a Property Nerd’s guide

West of Waverley Street the area is a grid that carries on the street names of the blocks to the north: Emerson Street, Ramona Street, Bryant Street, South Court and Waverley Street run southeast from Loma Verde Avenue to East Meadow Drive, crossed by Campesino Avenue and El Verano Avenue. The 1950 maps cut these blocks into lots mostly 50 feet wide. East of Waverley the streets bend into loops and short courts: Kipling Street, Cowper Street and Cowper Court, Alger Drive, Rambow Drive, Maureen Avenue, Ashton Avenue and Ashton Court, Murdoch Drive and Murdoch Court, and, in the St. Claire Gardens corner, St. Claire Drive, St. Michael Drive and St. Michael Court, Mackall Way and Toyon Place off Middlefield Road.

Lots are fairly uniform: the median in city parcel data is 6,250 sq ft, and the middle 80 percent run from about 6,000 to 7,900 sq ft. About 22 percent of the houses were built in 2000 or later, so original postwar houses and rebuilds share most blocks; Ramona, Bryant, South Court, Waverley and Emerson each have 17 to 24 houses from 2000 on. A few corners are later infill, with median build years of 1972 on Toyon Place, 1975 on Cowper Court and 1993 on Ashton Court. The city parcel layer shows no single-story overlay (R-1(S)) and no historic-inventory listing on any of these lots.

The Eichler houses are the exception to the postwar mix. The city's Eichler design guidelines list a 13-lot 1959 group on the southwest side of Middlefield Road, across from the Los Arboles tract, and Midcourt, nine lots on Toyon Place from 1972. A 2019 article on the Toyon Place tract describes its houses as having hipped roofs and angled beams projecting at the eaves, some with atriums and some with a gallery instead. FEMA's flood map puts eight houses in a high-risk zone at the parcel center, all near the middle of the Ramona, Bryant, South Court and Waverley blocks.