Montgomery Village, Santa Rosa, CA

Montgomery Village is built around the open-air shopping center of the same name, a Santa Rosa institution since 1950 that developer Hugh Codding carved out of a pair of orchards. That center is right inside the neighborhood, and it is no ordinary strip mall: Apple, lululemon, Sur La Table, Copperfield's Books, and dozens of shops and restaurants make it one of the most upscale walkable retail nodes in the city. That is the real pitch of living here. You can walk to genuinely good shopping and dining, you are sitting on the Highway 12 corridor with downtown a few minutes west, and the established residential streets around the center are well-kept and leafy. Spring Lake and Howarth Park are an easy drive east for the outdoor side of things. The tradeoff is the flip side of having the shopping center as a neighbor: weekend and holiday traffic around the center is real, and the bordering stretches of Sonoma Avenue and Farmers Lane stay busy. For buyers who want to actually walk to good retail in a city that mostly drives to it, Montgomery Village is close to one of a kind.