Downtown Campbell Homes for sale, recent sales and a Property Nerd’s guide

The oldest houses sit on the original town grid around the commercial strip. The city's historic context statement says the 1890s houses went up on S. Second St, N. Third St, N. Central Ave, N. Harrison Ave, Everett Ave, Railway Ave and Gilman Ave; the 1900s added First St, N. Second St, Sunnyside Ave and Rincon Ave; and after 1910 building spread to S. Third and Fourth streets and Alice and Kennedy avenues. Expect Queen Anne cottages from the 1890s, bungalows with Craftsman or Prairie lines, and Spanish Colonial and Mission Revival houses from about 1915 through the 1930s. City parcel data puts the median single-family house here at 1947, with a recorded size of about 1,560 sq ft, and nearly 40 percent of the houses have two or more stories.

Alice Ave is the set piece: the city's Historic Resource Inventory lists 35 historic-district properties on and around it, most built in the 1920s and 1930s. Individual landmarks nearby include the 1928 water tower and pump house, Queen Anne houses on First, Second and Third streets, and the 1895 Farley Building at 365 E. Campbell Ave, the original Bank of Campbell, which the city calls its oldest commercial building. City parcel records flag about 125 inventory properties inside this outline. Exterior work on them goes through the city's Historic Design Guidelines, and designated owners can apply for Mills Act property-tax contracts.

North and east of the old core, the town grid gives way to 1938-46 subdivisions such as Dahl's Addition, the McBain Tract, the Dahl-Rose Tract and the Los Palos units on Page St and Hawthorne Ave, then to condominium tracts: Hamilton Downs, recorded in 1971 with 336 units on N. First, Second and Third streets near Hamilton Ave, and Pruneyard Villas (1978) on Poplar Ave and El Patio Ct. Ainsley Square, recorded in 2000, added about 50 houses on courts such as Biscay, Tapestry and Waterford. Since 2015, townhome tracts have gone in between the light-rail tracks and Highway 17, on streets like Sunsweet Way, Lottie Ln and Robin Ridge Way. Most residential land here is zoned planned development, medium-density residential or R-1-6 single-family.

North of Hamilton Ave, between Winchester Blvd and Highway 17, Campbell's part of the Hamann Park area is a mid-century grid of its own: long north-south streets (Harrison Ave, Central Ave, Monica Ln, Almarida Dr) crossed by Pamlar Ave, David Ave and Payne Ave, with Lenor Way, Mitchell Ct, Clover Ave and Baywood Ave at the north end. The recorded tracts run from Winchester Villa (1947) on Rosemary Ln through Shady Acres (1951-54) on Harrison Ave and Central Ave and Shadowbrook (1956) on Monica Ln to the Central Park tracts (1961-62) on Lenor Way, Mitchell Ct, Almarida Dr and the north ends of Monica Ln and Central Ave. County parcel data counts about 380 single-family houses, more than nine in ten built 1950-64 (median 1958), on lots of about 6,100 to 9,100 sq ft, about three-quarters of them one story and nearly all zoned R-1-6; city records show about a dozen ADUs or second units already. Fifteen 1959 duplexes on Monica Ln near Hamilton, a 1971 apartment complex on about 6.5 acres off Almarida Dr, offices along Hamilton Ave and Winchester Blvd and a shopping center by the Highway 17 interchange (general commercial and mixed-use zoning) fill the south end. Just east of the freeway, Campbell keeps the west ends of Whitehall Ave, Whitethorne Dr, Aram Ave, Stokes St, Ravenscourt Ave, Tolworth Dr and Downing Ave: a 1962 tract of duplexes, fourplexes and small apartment buildings with a few 1963 houses, plus Tolworth Dr duplexes from 1963 and condominiums from 1979, zoned low-medium and medium density residential and R-1-6. City parcel records show these blocks joined Campbell in stages between 1952 and 1981. FEMA maps the blocks west of the freeway as Zone X (minimal flood hazard); about an eighth of the land east of it, along its east edge, is Zone D (possible but undetermined hazard), and none of it is in the state liquefaction zone.