Best-Value Neighborhoods in Tahoe City, CA

Alpine Meadows was conceived as the calmer answer to Squaw. San Francisco skier John Reily and a small group founded it in 1958 and opened it to the public in 1961, deliberately family-oriented and low-key next to its flashier neighbor. The ski area now markets under the Palisades Tahoe banner and connects to Olympic Valley by the Base-to-Base gondola, but the neighborhood itself stayed what it was: a quiet residential valley of single-family mountain homes along Alpine Meadows Road and Bear Creek. ... See Full Page

Dollar Point had rougher names before it got its dignified one. The Washoe called the headland Chinquapin. Locals once called it the lousy point. Then in 1927 San Francisco shipping magnate Robert Dollar, of the Dollar Steamship Line, bought the estate, his speedboat-racing grandson Stanley summered here, and the map made it official as Dollar Point in 1962. Earlier still, Lora Knight, who would go on to build Vikingsholm, owned the point in the 1920s. ... See Full Page

Sunnyside-Tahoe Park is the west-shore strip just south of Tahoe City where the lake does the talking. Its anchor, the Sunnyside resort, grew from a 1908 summer home into a lodge and marina by 1946, and the current restaurant and lodge relaunched in 1987 under a pair of restaurateurs who had helped start the Rusty Scupper chain. The neighborhood threads between Highway 89 and the shore, cabins and mid-century homes with a tier of lakefront mixed in. ... See Full Page

Tahoe City is the north and west shore's downtown, and it has been a resort town longer than almost anywhere on the lake. Platted in 1863, it came into its own around 1900 when Comstock timber baron Duane Bliss ran a steamer and a narrow-gauge railroad up from Truckee and opened the grand Tahoe Tavern. The lake's only outlet is here, controlled by the 1913 dam beside Fanny Bridge, named for the row of tourist backsides bent over the rail watching the trout. ... See Full Page