Los Altos is a city at the southern end of the San Francisco Peninsula, in the San Francisco Bay Area. The city is in Santa Clara County, California, United States. The population was 27,693 at the 2000 census.
Los Altos is a quiet "bedroom community" suburb serving both San Jose and San Francisco. Most of the city was developed between the 1950s and 1970s. As a formerly agricultural town, Los Altos has several unique features. Commercial zones are strictly limited to the downtown area (referred to by local merchants as Los Altos Village) and a few shopping centers and office parks lining Foothill Expressway and El Camino Real. The adjacent town of Los Altos Hills has no commercial zones, post office, or public library, and is dependent upon Los Altos for such services.
Los Altos, by design, strives to maintain a semi-rural atmosphere. Los Altos has no sidewalks except around the commercial zones mentioned above and along the most important arterial roads like San Antonio Road. Most roads have broad dirt shoulders and little or no street lighting. The civic center sits in the middle of an orchard, a tiny remnant of the large farms which once covered the entire area. The downtown is a triangle with arterials on all sides that allow most through traffic to bypass Main Street. In contrast, several nearby cities have downtowns that lack adequate bypasses (notably, Palo Alto and Menlo Park). Due to the city's strict low-density zoning, many Los Altos homes are now valued at $1 million and higher.
From the mid-1990s onward, downtown Los Altos has experienced mild economic difficulties due to competition from shopping centers and chain stores in nearby Mountain View and Palo Alto, as well as its lack of a hotel or movie theater. The problem of how to revitalize the downtown area continues to be a major issue in city politics.
Many residents of Los Altos are currently argueing about an apartment that The City of Los Altos wishes to build on the cross section of El Camino Real, a commercial avenue, and Distel Drive, a medical and residential avenue. This building is unsafe for pedestrians because the street traffic is already congested during school days, and 39 new families will congest it even more. Also, because the apartment has no garden or backyard, children will decide to play on the residential half on Distel Drive, and residents are not happy about this. As of May, 2006 construction has already begun.
Los Altos may have a legitimate claim to having the first scientifically designed sound baffle in the year 1970. Santa Clara County undertook a seminal study to mathematically calculate the effects of alternate soundwall designs along Foothill Expressway. The resulting design was built and successfully predicted reduction of seven to ten decibels in Noise pollution levels for adjacent homes.
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