On a spring morning along State Street, the smell of cardamom drifts out of a doorway painted a deep, glossy blue. A few steps down the block, a fine-dining room serves heirloom Indian recipes plated like jewellery. The Indians in Los Altos did not arrive here as a crowd. They arrived as engineers, founders and investors, one hire and one mortgage at a time, until a town built on apricot money became one of the quietest power centres of the Indian-American century.
The Place
Los Altos sits in the foothills of Santa Clara County, ringed by Palo Alto, Mountain View, Sunnyvale, Cupertino and the larger estates of Los Altos Hills. It covers barely six and a half square miles. There is no skyline, no industry, almost nothing to mark it out from the air except orderly streets and a great deal of green.
And yet this is one of the most expensive places to live in the United States. The 94022 ZIP code has ranked among the priciest in the country for years, and the city’s median household income runs north of 250,000 dollars. The wealth is real, but it is understated, hidden behind hedges and unremarkable mid-century houses that trade for several million each.
It is also a town that quietly turned Asian. By the 2020 census, more than a third of the roughly 31,600 residents identified as Asian, and a large share of them trace their roots to India.
How It Became Indian
To understand why Indian families settled here, you first have to understand why the town was rich enough to want.
Apricots and a railway man
Los Altos began as a real-estate idea. In 1906 Paul Shoup, an executive with the Southern Pacific Railroad, formed the Altos Land Company and bought 140 acres of orchard country. The name meant “the heights,” for the high point on the new rail line. A barbecue land sale in 1907 launched the first lots, and when the trains began running in 1908 the town had its spine.
Before the houses there were trees. This was the heart of the Valley of Heart’s Delight, where apricot, plum and cherry orchards ran for miles. In 1901 the orchardist J. Gilbert Smith planted Blenheim apricots near his farmhouse. When the city bought that land in 1954 to build its civic centre, the apricot trees were kept as a condition of the sale. The Heritage Orchard still grows beside City Hall, a deliberate memory of what the ground used to be.
Los Altos incorporated as a city on 1 December 1952, the eleventh in Santa Clara County. For a generation it was a comfortable bedroom town. Then the orchards next door turned into something else entirely.
The garage on Crist Drive
The transformation has a precise address. In 1976, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak assembled the first Apple computers in the garage of the Jobs family home at 2066 Crist Drive in Los Altos. The town that grew apricots was, almost overnight, sitting at the origin point of the personal-computer era.
As Silicon Valley boomed through the following decades, Los Altos became the address tech executives chose when they could afford anywhere. The schools were the best in the state. The lots were large. San Francisco was an hour up the peninsula and Stanford was minutes away. Money concentrated, and so did ambition.
The H-1B generation
The Indian presence here is inseparable from the visa that built modern Silicon Valley. Through the 1990s and 2000s, as the internet boom and the Y2K scramble created enormous demand for software engineers, the H-1B programme became the pipeline that carried thousands of Indian professionals to the Bay Area. Many were graduates of the Indian Institutes of Technology and other elite engineering schools.
These were not labourers chasing wages. They were highly credentialled technologists, and a striking share went on to start and lead companies. By the late 1990s, hundreds of valley tech firms already had Indian-born chief executives, and Indian founders launched roughly fifteen percent of the region’s startups in the decade that followed, the largest count of any immigrant group.
The first wave of these engineers tended to settle in more affordable valley cities. But as careers matured into equity, options and exits, the most successful began to move up the property ladder. For families who had built fortunes in software, Los Altos was the natural destination: small, safe, and home to the strongest public schools around.
Schools as the deciding factor
If one thing pulled Indian families specifically into Los Altos rather than its neighbours, it was education. The Los Altos Elementary School District ranks in the top one percent of California districts, with math and reading proficiency far above the state average. Los Altos High School ranks among the top one hundred in the state and several hundred nationally.
For a community that treats academic achievement as a near-sacred inheritance, that combination was irresistible. A house in Los Altos was not only a home. It was a guaranteed seat in a public school system that rivalled the private academies elsewhere in the country, paid for through property taxes rather than tuition.
The Landmarks
Aurum, 132 State Street. A fine-dining Indian restaurant in the centre of downtown, recognised by the Michelin Guide. Chef Manish Tyagi reworks heirloom regional recipes from across India with modern technique, and owner Anupam Bhatia built the room as a statement: Indian food in Los Altos belongs at the high end of the table, not the back of it.
Little Blue Door, 170 State Street. Inside the State Street Market food hall, this casual spot opened in 2022 from chef Srijith Gopinathan and Ayesha Thapar. Gopinathan, who also helmed the Michelin-starred Campton Place in San Francisco, draws on his native Kerala and on street food from across the subcontinent for a menu of vada pav, chaat and rotisserie dishes.
The Heritage Orchard, near 1 North San Antonio Road. The surviving apricot trees beside City Hall, preserved when the city bought the land in 1954. For newcomers from any background, it is the town’s reminder that the wealth here was grown before it was coded.
2066 Crist Drive. The Jobs family home, where the first Apple computers were built in 1976. It is a private house, not a museum, but for the engineers who moved here decades later it carries an almost mythic weight. The valley they came to work in was, in part, born on this street.
Sunnyvale Hindu Temple, 450 Persian Drive, Sunnyvale. A short drive from Los Altos, this is one of the area’s busiest temples, open daily and renovated into one of the most elaborate in the region. For Los Altos families, weekend pujas, weddings and festival observances often mean a trip down to Sunnyvale.
ISKCON Silicon Valley, Mountain View. The local Hare Krishna temple, known for its architecture, daily kirtans and cultural programmes. It serves as a spiritual and community anchor for Hindu families across the mid-peninsula, Los Altos among them.
India Community Center, 525 Los Coches Street, Milpitas. A 40,000-square-foot hub for the valley’s Indian diaspora, with a fitness centre, classes and a 600-seat auditorium that hosts Diwali and Holi celebrations, weddings and visiting dignitaries. It is the gathering place that small, scattered communities like the one in Los Altos lean on for scale.
Where They Came From
The Indians of Los Altos are, overwhelmingly, a professional migration. Their origin map follows the geography of Indian engineering education and the cities that feed it: Delhi and the IIT system, Bengaluru and Hyderabad and their software industries, Chennai, Mumbai and Pune.
This is chain migration of a particular kind. It moved not through villages and extended families so much as through campuses, employers and visa sponsorships. An engineer arrives on an H-1B, brings a spouse, sponsors a sibling, and over years the network thickens. The shared language is often as much the vocabulary of startups and equity as it is Hindi, Tamil, Telugu or Kannada.
Across the Bay Area, Indians are now one of the two largest Asian-American groups, and Santa Clara County holds a substantial share of them, a pattern documented in the broader story of Indian Americans in the United States. Los Altos is one of the small, expensive towns where that population has crested into real local presence, the place engineers move once the company they joined or founded finally pays off.
The same arc has played out in affluent suburbs across the country. Indian tech and professional families have shaped places as far apart as Stone Ridge in Virginia, Celina outside Dallas, Gilbert in Arizona and Milton in Georgia. Los Altos is the West Coast version of the same instinct: find the best schools, buy in, and let the community gather quietly around them.
Los Altos Today
Today the Indian presence in Los Altos is felt more in private life than in public signage. There is no Little India here, no commercial strip of sari shops and sweet stores. The community expresses itself instead through the school pickup lines, the temple drives down to Sunnyvale, the State Street restaurants that now treat Indian food as worthy of a Michelin mention.
That restraint is partly the town’s character and partly the community’s stage of arrival. These are families who have, by most measures, won. Their children fill the advanced classes at Los Altos High. Their parents sit on the boards of startups and venture funds across the valley. The diaspora here is affluent, integrated and quietly powerful, much like the technology-driven communities of Israelis in neighbouring Palo Alto or the established diaspora of Filipinos in Carson further south.
What it has not built, and may never need to, is a visible ethnic quarter. The Indians in Los Altos found a town that already had everything they were looking for, the schools, the safety, the proximity to the industry they helped create, and simply moved in. The story is written in property records and class rosters rather than storefronts. It is no less real for being so discreet.
If you trace the families who moved here from the valley’s more crowded cities, you find a community that mapped onto Los Altos the way it has onto Indian neighbourhoods in Livermore and other peninsula and East Bay towns: arriving for work, staying for the schools, and turning a former orchard town into one more chapter of the Indian-American story in California.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many Indians live in Los Altos, California?
Los Altos had about 31,600 residents at the 2020 census, of whom more than a third identified as Asian. The Indians in Los Altos make up a significant portion of that Asian population, though the city does not publish a separate official count for the Indian community specifically.
Why did Indian families move to Los Altos?
The Indians in Los Altos came largely as Silicon Valley engineers, founders and investors, many of whom arrived on H-1B visas during the tech boom of the 1990s and 2000s. As their careers and equity matured, they moved to Los Altos for its top-ranked public schools, safety and closeness to the technology industry they helped build.
Are there Indian restaurants in Los Altos?
Yes. Downtown Los Altos has Aurum at 132 State Street, a fine-dining Indian restaurant recognised by the Michelin Guide, and Little Blue Door at 170 State Street, a casual Indian spot in the State Street Market food hall opened in 2022 by a Michelin-starred chef.
Is there a Hindu temple in Los Altos?
There is no major temple inside Los Altos itself, but families have several nearby. The Sunnyvale Hindu Temple on Persian Drive and ISKCON Silicon Valley in Mountain View are both a short drive away and serve the surrounding communities.
Why is Los Altos so wealthy?
Los Altos grew from apricot orchards into a bedroom town for Silicon Valley executives. Its 94022 ZIP code ranks among the most expensive in the United States, and the median household income exceeds 250,000 dollars, driven by tech wealth and a tightly limited supply of homes.
What is the connection between Los Altos and Apple?
Apple was effectively born in Los Altos. In 1976 Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak built the first Apple computers in the garage of the Jobs family home at 2066 Crist Drive, an origin point for the personal-computer industry that the town’s later technology residents inherited.
If your family’s story passed through Los Altos, or any of the places Indians have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From the engineering campuses of Delhi, Bengaluru and Chennai, to a quiet street in the California foothills, to wherever you are now.