What Outsiders Get Wrong About East Palo Alto

There is a certain look people give when they learn where we do our work. It is not unkind, usually. It is a small recalibration, a quiet oh, the sound of an old story loading in the background. And the story is almost always wrong, or at least a decade or three past its expiration date. We have spent forty years in this city, on the same corner of Beech Street, and we would like to offer a few corrections. Not to scold anyone. Just because the kids we work with deserve to be seen as they actually are, in the place they actually live.

So here is what outsiders tend to get wrong, one myth at a time, with the fuller picture underneath each one.

Myth one: East Palo Alto is just the poorer half of Palo Alto

The hyphen fools people. They hear "East Palo Alto" and assume it is a neighborhood of Palo Alto, the way East Nashville is part of Nashville. It is not. East Palo Alto is a separate city, in a different county (San Mateo, not Santa Clara), separated from Palo Alto by a freeway and a creek and, for most of the last century, a hard line of who was allowed to live where.

It is also one of California's youngest cities. For most of its history the area was unincorporated county land with no official boundary of its own. Residents changed that in 1983, voting to incorporate by a razor margin: 1,782 to 1,767, a difference of fifteen votes. That is not the story of a suburb. That is the story of a community deciding, by the thinnest possible margin and against real resistance, to govern itself.

The name shares a word with its wealthy neighbor, and the two cities do sit close enough to see each other. But East Palo Alto is not Palo Alto's shadow. It is its own place, with its own city hall, its own history, and its own mind.

Myth two: it's a dangerous place

This is the sticky one. For a difficult stretch in the early 1990s, East Palo Alto carried a national reputation it never fully shook, and a lot of people who have never set foot here still carry that reputation for it. The trouble is that the story stopped updating around 1992. The city changed. The story did not.

What that outdated headline erases is everything ordinary about the place, which is to say almost everything. Families walking kids to school. Church parking lots full on a Wednesday night. Neighbors who have known one another for three generations. Taco trucks and Tongan feasts and Sunday services in three languages. The reputation remembers one hard chapter and forgets the forty years of ordinary, stubborn, communal life on either side of it.

The story stopped updating around 1992. The city changed. The story did not.

We are not going to pretend the city has no hard edges. Every city does, and this one has carried more than its share of pressure, much of it from forces it did not create. But if your whole picture of East Palo Alto is a crime statistic from a year the current high schoolers were not alive for, you are not describing the city. You are describing a rumor.

Myth three: it's a place without culture or roots

People sometimes talk about under-resourced communities as though "under-resourced" were the entire personality. It is a strange flattening, and East Palo Alto is a good place to see how wrong it is.

This is one of the most multicultural and multilingual communities in the entire Bay Area. Latino, Black, and Pacific Islander residents make up the largest groups, and the city is home to one of the highest concentrations of Pacific Islanders of any city in the country, roughly eleven percent of the population. Its Black community goes back to the years after World War II, when families moved here for low-cost housing in one of the few peninsula communities without racially restrictive covenants shutting them out. Its Latino community has grown for decades into a vibrant majority. Layer those histories together and you do not get a place with no culture. You get a place with almost too much of it to fit in one sentence.

The faith community is part of that texture too. Hope Horizon was born out of local churches in 1984, and churches across the city still carry a real share of the work of raising the next generation here. That rootedness is not a footnote to the place. It is a load-bearing wall.

Myth four: the kids here can't compete

This is the myth that matters most to us, because the kids can feel it, and it is the one we most want to take apart carefully. Because being honest about the opportunity gap and being condescending about the kids are two very different things, and outsiders often confuse them.

The gap is real, and we will not soften it. In the local Ravenswood City Elementary School District, during the 2024-25 school year, about 12 percent of students scored proficient or above in English on the state test. The statewide figure that year was closer to 49 percent. Roughly nine in ten Ravenswood students come from low-income families. Those numbers describe a genuine, structural shortage of opportunity, sitting a few miles from some of the richest companies on earth.

But here is the part outsiders miss when they read numbers like that: a shortage of opportunity is not a shortage of ability. Those are not the same thing, and confusing them is exactly the mistake we are trying to name. Give these kids the resources their neighbors take for granted, and watch what they do with them.

East Palo Alto fields its own FIRST Robotics Competition team, the Churrobots, team #8048, the only one in the city. In a single stretch it grew from 21 students to 36, roughly seventy percent, kids building and coding and competing against teams from schools with ten times the budget. At Hope Horizon, 80 percent of our students improved in reading over the last school year, and after summer camp, 93 percent of them told us they felt more confident. Twelve of our alumni are in college right now on Hope Horizon scholarships.

None of that is a fluke, and none of it is charity making a nice story out of thin material. It is what happens when real talent finally meets a fair amount of opportunity. The talent was never the missing ingredient.

Myth five: it's a place people are trying to leave

Outsiders often assume the goal for a kid from East Palo Alto is to get out. And sure, some kids will move away, chase a job, see the world, and that is good and right. But the assumption underneath the myth, that the city is only a starting line to escape, gets the community exactly backward.

Plenty of people here are fighting, hard, to stay. Rent control has been part of this city since incorporation, one of the concessions that made it a city at all, precisely because families wanted to hold their ground against the pressure of Silicon Valley money pushing in from every side. Some of our own staff grew up in these blocks and chose to come back and pour into them. The dream is not always exit. Very often it is roots. It is a kid growing up, doing well, and deciding this place is worth building rather than fleeing.

That is the version of East Palo Alto we would ask you to carry instead: not a headline, not a hyphen, not a place to be saved from. A real city, proud and multicultural and forty years into governing itself, full of kids whose ability has never been the question. The only question was ever whether enough people would show up. That question we can all help answer.