The revitalization projects in 2000, and high income high-tech professionals moving into new developments, including employees from Google and Facebook, have begun to slowly eliminate the historically wide cultural and economic differences between the two cities.

[9] A small minority of Pacific Islanders also reside in East Palo Alto, most of Tongan, Samoan, and Fijian origin.

[9][10] The prosperity that benefited Silicon Valley during the dot-com boom of the late 1990s largely bypassed East Palo Alto.

The Ravenswood City School District, which serves East Palo Alto and part of adjoining Menlo Park, has struggled with low academic performance.

[11] Eventually, however, the Peninsula's shortage of land and soaring property prices meant that East Palo Alto became an option for urban regeneration.

Since 1888, Stanford University, on the west side of Palo Alto, prohibited alcohol sales within a radius of 1.5-mile (2.4 km) from the campus.

[12] Whiskey Gulch, which was just outside these limits, became home to a number of liquor stores, bars, and music venues.

The rules were relaxed in 1970,[12] but the neighborhood still retained this character until 2000, when the city tore down Whiskey Gulch and replaced it with the University Circle office complex.

Over 25% of East Palo Alto (400+ acres) has been bulldozed and replaced with brand new housing and brand-name retail establishments since approximately 1997,[6] attracting an entirely new demographic.

[15] The University Square community has become particularly appealing to young high-tech professionals and high-income couples, including many employees from Google, Facebook, Sun Microsystems, Yahoo!, and various other software and startup companies.

After a year-long excavation of 60 graves and 3,000 artifacts, researchers concluded Native Americans had utilized the area as a cemetery and camp, rather than as a permanent settlement.

In 1868, after Woods' investments failed he sold the wharf to Lester Phillip Cooley (1837–1882), who leased the land to the brick factory Hunter and Schakleford.

[18] With the outbreak of World War I, the north side of East Palo Alto became a military training ground, of which only the Veterans Administration Hospital in Menlo Park still exists (now as part of the VA Sierra Pacific Network).

[19] Blockbusting involves instilling panic in white neighborhoods by warning of a "Negro invasion" when a black family considers purchasing a house in an area, in order to produce white flight and an ensuing drop in property values, which can then be purchased at a heavy discount and sold or rented to African Americans for a profit.

[19] These differences in demographics and wealth perversely accelerated with the introduction of the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977, which banned redlining.

During the civil rights movement of the 1960s there was a renewed interest in African history, one expression of which was a fad for Swahili.

[17][4] Critics of the change pointed out that Nairobi was the capital of Kenya, in East Africa, and had little to do with the cultural roots of most black Americans.

After several years of pro-incorporation campaigning by local community groups, including Barbara A. Mouton and East Palo Alto's Senior Citizen Center president Ruth I. Myers, 1982 ballot measure that was stopped by a lawsuit, and a subsequent election the next year, East Palo Alto became a city on July 1, 1983,[23][24] with Barbara A. Mouton as its first Mayor.

The legal challenges were led by former U.S. Congress member Pete McCloskey, who represented one of the real-estate brokers whose original blockbusting campaign had turned EPA into a mostly black town.

[25] Significant gentrification occurred in East Palo Alto from around the founding of Facebook, with the construction of a large shopping center named Ravenswood 101 and several upscale housing communities intended for high-earning Silicon Valley workers.

[citation needed] This development faced opposition from some residents, who charged that it priced locals out of one of the region's only affordable communities while providing only low-paying retail jobs and consuming disproportionate land area (2.2 square miles).

[27] Starting in 2006, a large real estate investor, Page Mill Properties, purchased almost the entire west side of East Palo Alto and contested most of the city's rent control laws in what some claimed was a 'predatory equity scheme'.

[28] Page Mill left East Palo Alto in the fall of 2009 after defaulting on a $240-million bank loan.

It is bordered on the west by Menlo Park, to the south by Palo Alto, and to the east by the San Francisco Bay.

After the school was closed because of low enrollment, the building was demolished in 1995 to make room for the Gateway 101 Shopping Center.

Today, East Palo Alto residents are zoned to Menlo-Atherton High School in Atherton.