Palo Alto Eichlers: 32 Tracts and 2,700 Homes in the City Eichler Built
Sunnyvale has about 1,100 Eichlers. Mountain View has about 240, Cupertino about 225 and Redwood City 115. Add them together and you are still a thousand homes short of Palo Alto, where Joseph Eichler built roughly 2,700 houses between 1949 and 1974.
Palo Alto is not just the biggest Eichler market. It is where the type was worked out. Anshen & Allen drew the first plans here in 1950, Jones & Emmons laid out Greenmeadow here in 1954, the atrium houses of Los Arboles followed in 1959, and Claude Oakland closed out Eichler's career here in 1974 with the only original two-story models in the city. Across 32 recorded tracts, the address you buy decides the plan, the architect and what the city will let you build.
Our Palo Alto Eichler Guide maps all of it, and it comes with its own home online: EichlerPaloAlto.com.
Twenty-Five Years of Building
Eichler's first Palo Alto tract was University Gardens in 1949: 63 lots, drawn in-house before he hired an architect. A year later he had Anshen & Allen, and four tracts opened in 1950 alone: Green Gables, Greer Park, Charleston Meadows and El Centro Gardens. That December, Architectural Forum named Green Gables a Subdivision of the Year.
The scale grew quickly: Fairmeadow's 300 lots in 1951, Greenmeadow in 1954, Edgewood and its shopping center in 1956, and Royal Manor's 201 lots in 1957–58, by which point the atrium had become a marketed feature on most new plans.
Claude Oakland's first work in the city was a 13-lot tract on Middlefield Road in 1959. Eichler Homes went bankrupt in 1967, but Joseph Eichler kept building in smaller numbers, and Palo Alto received his final three tracts, all by Oakland: Midcourt in 1972, the Community Center tract in 1973 and Los Arboles Addition No. 2 in 1974. Eichler died that July.
By the city's count, the 32 recorded tracts hold 2,108 lots, more than half of them built before 1955. The figure of about 2,700 used by most published histories includes Eichlers built outside the recorded subdivisions, and it is the number we quote.
Why the Tract Matters Here
In Palo Alto, three separate layers of protection apply unevenly, and they are routinely confused.
- The National Register. Green Gables and Greenmeadow were listed on July 28, 2005, among the first modern suburban tracts in the country. The listing is a designation of significance. On its own, it does not prohibit demolition, a second story or a new front elevation.
- Single-story overlay zoning. This is the one that bans second stories. It takes a petition signed by 70 percent of affected owners and a Council vote. Greenmeadow and Triple El hold overlays. Royal Manor's bid was halted by the Council in 2016, and a 2010 Fairmeadow petition stalled short of the threshold.
- The Eichler Neighborhood Design Guidelines. Adopted by the City Council in 2018 after the 2015 wave of two-story rebuilds, they apply to all 32 tracts and work through the city's Individual Review process. They guide; they do not ban.
The result is that a house on one side of a tract line can be valued, and altered, differently from a house on the other.
The Plans: Before and After the Atrium
The 1950–56 houses put everything between a closed street wall and one wall of glass to the garden. The front door opens straight into the living room. Privacy comes from the front, light from the back. That is Green Gables, Greer Park, Fairmeadow and Greenmeadow.
From 1957 the atrium moved the arrival outdoors: an open-air court inside the footprint, with glass on two sides of the living room. That is Royal Manor, Los Arboles and everything Oakland drew. The constants never changed: radiant heat in the slab, a post-and-beam frame, tongue-and-groove roof decking as the ceiling, and glass to the beam line. Houses run from about 1,100 square feet in the earliest tracts to well over 2,000 in the late atrium models, typically on 6,000 to 8,500 square foot lots.
Original two-story Eichlers exist here only from 1974: the Oakland models at Los Arboles Addition No. 2 on Torreya Court and Loma Verde Avenue, and a pair on Melville Avenue at Cowper.
Get the Full Property Nerds® Field Guide
The blog gives you the story, but the full guide goes deeper.
Download the complete Palo Alto Eichler Guide for the full schedule of 32 tracts with years, architects and lot counts, a schematic map of where the Eichlers are, chapters on Green Gables, Greer Park, Triple El and Edgewood, Greenmeadow, Fairmeadow and Los Arboles, the plan diagrams, the protection rules, the buyer's and owner's checklist, and four of our own Palo Alto Eichler sales.
Get the Full Guide →Tract by Tract
The guide groups Palo Alto's Eichlers into three areas, and covers six tracts in depth.
- Green Gables, 1950–51. Sixty-three Anshen & Allen houses off Embarcadero, where the AA-1 was built first. Only 46 still counted as contributing to the Register district in 2005, which is why the remaining originals price the way they do.
- Greer Park and the Duveneck tracts, 1950–54. Greer Park's 131 Anshen & Allen houses, Channing Park and Walnut Grove: pre-atrium plans with near-blank fronts. Listing portals label the area Duveneck or St. Francis rather than by tract.
- Triple El and Edgewood, 1955–56. Jones & Emmons at full stride in Triple El's 68 lots, with taller roofs and four-bedroom plans. Edgewood's 93 lots by A. Quincy Jones sit beside Edgewood Plaza, redeveloped in the 2010s with its original Eichler buildings retained.
- Greenmeadow, 1954–55, plus No. 3 in 1961–62. Six Jones & Emmons models around a park, pool and community center still owned by the Greenmeadow Community Association. With Register listing and an overlay, it is the most protected Eichler neighborhood in the city.
- Fairmeadow and the south tracts, 1950–58. Fairmeadow's 300 lots on loops and circles, plus Charleston Meadows (158 lots), Charleston Gardens (79), Meadow Park (75) and the small Fairpark, Faircourt and Midfair tracts.
- Los Arboles, 1959–61 and 1974. Eighty-four atrium houses of about 1,600 to 2,000 square feet, low gables with the carport under the ridge, and much of the original earth-tone palette intact.
Street extents are examples, not boundaries; we confirm every tract line against the city's tract map, not a listing portal.
What the Numbers Say
The guide's valuation chapter uses four of our own Palo Alto Eichler sales, across four tracts and six years:
- 3925 Nelson Drive, Greenmeadow. A 1954 original of 1,792 square feet, three bedrooms and two baths, listed at $3,288,000 and closed at $3,510,000 in March 2026, about $1,959 per square foot and 7 percent over list.
- 742 De Soto Drive, Greer Park area. A 1952 Eichler expanded to 2,248 square feet with two primary suites and a pool, sold for $4,301,000 in October 2024, about $1,914 per square foot.
- 682 Wildwood Lane, Green Gables. A 1950 AA-1 courtyard model of 1,752 square feet, four bedrooms and two baths, sold for $3,000,000 in April 2024, about $1,712 per square foot.
- 2207 Greer Road, Triple El. Five bedrooms and 2,436 square feet, listed at $3,798,000 and sold for $3,500,000 in January 2020, about $1,437 per square foot.
For a finished Eichler, the working range in 2024–26 ran roughly $3.0 million to $4.3 million. In September 2026, Palo Alto Eichler asking prices had a median near $3.5 million at about $1,900 per square foot. Four sales are a pattern, not a statistic: intact originals in protected tracts go over asking, and well-expanded houses set the ceiling.
The Property Nerd Questions
Before writing an offer or planning an addition on a Palo Alto Eichler:
- Is it an Eichler? Mackay, Stern & Price and others built on the same streets in the same years. Check the structure (exposed beams, no attic, tongue-and-groove ceiling, glass to the beam line, radiant tube in the slab) and then the recorded tract.
- Get three answers from the city in writing: the recorded tract name, whether the parcel sits inside an overlay, and whether your project triggers Individual Review.
- In Green Gables or Greenmeadow, is the house a contributing structure?
- Has the radiant slab been pressure-tested and thermally scanned? Original copper is now 60 to 75 years old. Ask what year it was repiped.
- Treat the roof as a system: foam or membrane on a very low slope, and check the beam tails and drip line for rot.
- Is the glass original single-pane? Replacements should match the sightlines.
- In an atrium house, is the atrium still open? Roofing it over is the remodel that costs the most value.
- In Greenmeadow, what are the association dues and rules that travel with the house?
- Which schools? Palo Alto Unified assigns by address and assignments change, so verify with the district.
Explore EichlerPaloAlto.com
The guide is the deep read. EichlerPaloAlto.com is the place to keep up with it: tract pages, the Palo Alto Eichler overview, house-number and plan notes, and Palo Alto Eichlers as they come to market. Bookmark it if you are waiting for the right house in the right tract.
The Series
Palo Alto joins the other City Eichler Guides: Los Altos, Burlingame, Cupertino, East Bay, San Francisco, Foster City, Monte Sereno, Mountain View, Redwood City, San Jose and Santa Clara.
The Boyenga Team at Compass
Eric and Janelle Boyenga lead Silicon Valley's #1 Eichler team. We have sold Eichlers in Palo Alto and across the Peninsula since 1996, from Green Gables to Greenmeadow, and we have represented both Joseph Eichler's first home in Atherton and the X-100 in the San Mateo Highlands. With more than 2,256 homes sold, $2.3 billion in volume and 28+ years in Silicon Valley, we bring data, design knowledge and a network of Eichler buyers to every sale.
We price Palo Alto Eichlers by tract, architect and what is still intact, not by bedroom count. For every Eichler we list, we bring the tract record and the overlay and Register answers, and we introduce the home to Eichler buyers through Compass Private Exclusives before it goes public.
Download the Palo Alto Eichler Guide PDF
Palo Alto has more Eichlers than any city, and every tract is different.
Whether you are thinking about buying, selling, renovating, preserving, or simply learning more about the city where the Eichler was worked out, the full Palo Alto Eichler Guide is designed to help you see the market like a Property Nerd®.
Download the Palo Alto Eichler Guide PDFThinking of buying or selling an Eichler in Palo Alto?
Talk with Eric & Janelle Boyenga, Silicon Valley's #1 Eichler team.
Contact the Boyenga TeamEichlers@Boyenga.com · 650.383.8606 · 408.373.1660
EichlerPaloAlto.com · Boyenga Team | Compass · DRE 01254725 / 01254724
Price ranges and sales are drawn from public sources and our own records, 2020–26, and are not appraisals. Information is deemed reliable but not guaranteed. Compass is a licensed real estate broker in California. Equal Housing Opportunity.