Santana Row, San Jose, CA

Santana Row is the closest San Jose comes to a European shopping street, and living here means living on top of it. Federal Realty built the roughly 42-acre mixed-use district on the site of an aging 1960s shopping center, and its debut was dramatic: a huge eight-alarm fire tore through the largest building about a month before opening in August 2002, yet the project still opened that November. Today it packs designer shops, dozens of restaurants, a hotel, a theater and a growing roster of tech offices into a walkable, pedestrian-first streetscape with tree-lined lanes and small plazas. The setting stacks the deck for shoppers: the Westfield Valley Fair mall, one of the region's top retail destinations, sits right across Stevens Creek Boulevard, and the famously eccentric Winchester Mystery House, built out by Sarah Winchester over decades of additions, stands a short way south on Winchester Boulevard. Housing is high-density condos and apartments over ground-floor retail, cohesively designed and professionally maintained, which gives the whole place a polished, resort-like look. This is the anti-suburb: dense, upscale and lively, for people who want restaurants and shopping at the doorstep rather than a yard. The honest tradeoffs are the premium prices, the crowds and parking pressure that come with a destination-retail district, and the near-total absence of a quiet residential feel. But for buyers who want walkable, upscale, low-maintenance living with the best shopping in the South Bay downstairs, nothing else in San Jose is quite like Santana Row.