Vasona Park is nice. Been there a few times.
The last time I was in Vasona was when the kids were little and we drove through looking at the Christmas lights. This was my first time walking the park and I was rather disappointed with the maintenance there. It felt a bit shabby (looks great from the highway, but up close, not so much). A lot of the problem is that cities don’t maintain the lawns in their parks because of the fear of pesticides and the water rationing. So the big expanses of lawn are now mostly weeds riddled with ground squirrel burrows. There were lots of large fallen tree limbs that nobody is picking up.
Ever since we started paying tens of billions to illegals and homeless, the state of our parks has declined precipitously. Taxes from legal citizens support the illegals, indigent, bums and homeless, not our “public squares,” and civic life is much worse than it used to be. I think this conclusion is a straight line from “A” to “B.”
To make it worse, Los Gato and Vasona are right in the middle of the most affluent region in the country.
We spend a lot of time in the Coeur d’Alene, Idaho area. It is far less prosperous than Silicon Valley, yet is conservatively governed, has a minuscule problem with illegals and homeless, and far lower taxes. Somehow the city parks there are magnificent compared to the crap in California.