Solano Real Estate Scene: Nice job, Fairfield

I relocated to Vacaville with my wife, Mary, and our four little kids in September 1988. We sold our home in foggy Pacifica and moved to boiling hot Vacaville. Mary had two sisters who had migrated from our hometown, the city, to Vacaville and we visited occasionally in the 1980s for my kids to visit their Vacaville cousins. Solano County seemed like a decent place to live. Vacaville was growing with affordable homes, clean new schools and new neighborhoods like the Meadowlands, Foxborough and Browns Valley. Prior to moving to our home four blocks from Callison Elementary School in the Meadowlands, all we really knew about Vacaville was from what we saw during our six or seven visits for kid birthday parties during the ’80s. As a kid, I remember my parents stopping at the Nut Tree, with me and my six brothers and sisters, to hit the bathroom, have a bite to eat or break up a fight in the back seat on our way to Lake Tahoe. I remember the pungent odor of onions driving through town on Interstate 80 and that Vacaville was where Charlie Manson lived. Over the past 30 years, Fairfield has grown, too, and as I was driving from Rancho Solano to Costco in Green Valley the other day, I was thinking about what a great job the city of Fairfield has done with some of its growth. I took the new Business Center Drive back road to Costco and it’s convenient and well done. Rancho Solano and Paradise Valley are great communities that didn’t exist prior to us moving to Solano County and the newer Green Valley area from the freeway to Eastridge is beautifully done with tree-lined Green Valley Road. There has always been a little friendly competition between Vacaville and Fairfield and if you take a close look at the two cities strictly from a new neighborhood and development standpoint over the past 35 years, Fairfield might be ahead. For proof, just take a Sunday drive around Rancho Solano Golf Course and then go wine tasting or olive oil tasting five minutes away and compare that to a drive around the shuttered Green Tree Golf course and then head over to the Nut Tree or the outlets for lunch. Nice job, Fairfield!