Lexington is hot house central, highly prized by a certain segment of the population who are trying desperately to get their kids into Harvard, and some very unfortunate people who moved there for 'good schools', then discovered they're not good, they're just high pressure, status driven places.
Cross out
Lexington and insert
Cupertino,
Saratoga, or
Palo Alto (etc.), and you've described the Bay Area perfectly. Your housing points are spot-on, too, though the term
bidding wars really doesn't describe this place properly these days. It's more of a crazed culture of mass insanity focused on a single goal: winning the competition to get the house at all costs.
Some years ago, during a down period in the real estate craze, my mom was visiting and we looked at an open house in an upscale part of an upscale town here. The place was on the kind of lot that causes you to imagine your children tumbling down it to their deaths. The house itself was in woeful condition and a balcony was blocked off because it wasn't structurally sound and was located high off the land below.
My mom said to the agent, "The house is not in great shape," and he replied,
"Well, what do you expect for 1.2 million?"I am not making this up. And it's WORSE now. Way worse.
Taking this idea back to the public-vs-private and status-seeking thing, status hysteria is thriving in many of the public high schools around here. Status comes from getting lots of A++++s with garlands, which leads to incredible pressure. My eldest used to go to a gaming day thing in Cupertino on Sundays last summer. I would go to the local library to self-teach mathematics. The place was always, always crammed full of high school kids doing their summer AP work. Most of them looked pretty miserable, and their whispered conversations revealed that they were certainly not there for the joy of learning.
Seriously, the pressure is so intense, there have been a number of teenage suicides on the train tracks near the Palo Alto schools in recent years (I don't know how many, but there have been 2 so far in 2015).
So IMO, public or private, we have a cultural problem in our high-achieving schools: get all As wherever you go to school! Win competitions, even if you have to spend a significant chunk of your childhood memorizing the dictionary for the spelling bee! Don't take risks! There are two kinds of people in the world: winners and losers! Etc.
