From our interview with designer and homeowner Jennifer Ott.
We were living in San Francisco. My husband, Russ Poldrack, is a professor at Stanford University, and he was commuting. I’m a designer and color consultant. I wanted to live in the city, but I told him that if he ever got sick of the commute, I would consider moving. Then COVID happened, and when he had to start taking the train back down to work, he was like, “Uh, I really don’t want to have to do this again.”
So we started looking, and everything’s expensive throughout the Bay Area, but in Palo Alto, [California], near Stanford particularly, it’s very expensive. I hadn’t fully understood this previously, but Stanford started allowing faculty to build homes on university-owned land in the late 1800s. There are around 900 of these homes on campus. The deal is that you can only buy them if you’re a qualifying Stanford faculty member. In our case, the price ended up being a little lower than if anyone in the area could buy it.
