[mapgrep]

Adding to your advice to look in Berkeley, that's especially wise as housing prices drop a lot during the summer since most UC Berkeley students (who rent a huge percentage of the apartments) are away on internships or breaks of their own. In addition to shared houses as you mention, there tend to be lots of summer sublets at cut rates. Assuming you're reasonably close to BART it's very convenient to SF, not at all convenient to South Bay/core Silicon Valley.

I'd be curious if Palo Alto similarly gets cheaper during the summer.