Maintenance: Of Everything (Part One) — Stewart Brand (Stripe Press, January 2026). Brand's new book argues that the real work of civilization isn't invention but the patient care of complex systems. "Civilization is maintenance."
How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They're Built — Stewart Brand. Brand shows how buildings change over time as their users adapt, hack, and retrofit them, often in ways designers never anticipated. It's an essential primer for anyone designing civic systems — digital or physical — who wants to build things that are flexible, humane, and responsive to real-world use over decades. The intellectual home for what berkeleybuild.com does: independently following how Berkeley changes over time. How new housing actually moves from proposal to design to entitlement to construction to deep impacts on our community, our daily conversations, our fabric of life.
Video flyby of the 17 largest private housing projects in Berkeley, each with over 200 units planned. Orange: the project has reached the "entitled" or approved stage, but has not received building permits; Yellow: at least one building permit is issued, but construction has not started; Blue: construction is underway; Green: project is completed and is ready for occupancy.
Four major UC Berkeley student housing projects in the pipeline: 1950 Oxford (300 units), 2200 Bancroft (550 units), 2556 Haste (556 units), and the Anna Head site at 2400 Bowditch (750 units / ~1,500 beds). Together these projects represent over 5,000 new students housed. The tour starts at the Campanile and visits each in turn. Buildings shown at proposed heights and footprints. Purple: UC Berkeley; Yellow, Orange: Approved, Permitted; Blue: Under Construction; Green: Completed.
View south to north along Adeline and Shattuck Avenue, starting at the Campanile. Highlights downtown Berkeley's housing development corridor.
Same tour hosted on YouTube to test higher-quality video delivery without affecting site repo size.
Tour from the Elmwood Theater north along College Avenue, then west along Bancroft Way to Shattuck Avenue. Surveys south Berkeley's residential and commercial fabric.
The Colab notebook offers a guided tour with explanations of the data sources and what you're seeing. Or open the KML directly in your own Google Earth client.
🌍 Open Berkeley Housing in Google Earth 🌍 Open KML in Google EarthEvery number in this project traces back to a SQL query against a public database. Our methodology defines what we count, where the data comes from, how it differs from city reporting, and how to submit corrections.
Read the full methodology →These several web sites are designed to track every step of our actual housing development from permit application to certificate of occupancy to actual occupation. Originally built to prepare Berkeley's Annual Progrss Report to the California Housing and Community Development department using an independent, completely open public database constructed from the City of Berkeley Open.Gov data, we now have outlined a new way to enlist thousands of data science students and instructors to help our overburdened planning offices in every city tell our housing story in a clear and accurate way. These pages are a first attempt.
In building our independent APR for 2023, 2024, and 2025, it became clear that the official APR suffered from cumulative double counting, errors in dating of entitlements, of issuance of actual building permits and inspections. Since Berkeley submitted its report to HCD on March 26, 2026, covering CY 2025, here are the differences; we corrected for accounting errors and redundant project entries for both Table A and Table A-1. The more accurate number of residential units issued building permits is as follows:
| Year | Reported Units Permitted | Deductions (Inaccuracies) | Actual Unique Units |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2025 | 463 units | -200 units | 263 units |
| 2024 | 731 units | -486 units | 245 units |
| 2023 | 431 units | -126 units | 305 units |
| 2022 | 887 units | 0 units | 887 units |
| 2021 | 659 units | 0 units | 659 units |
| 2020 | 733 units | -267 units | 466 units |
Not huge errors, but when Berkeley is tasked by the State to enable over 1,000 new units to be built each year until 2031, we are behind in applications for permits, behind in entitlements, behind in building permits issued, and, most importantly, behind in buildings completed and ready for occupancy. The State tracks building permits issued: the real issue is that almost all actual construction is stalled due to increased building costs, a decreasing labor force, higher interest rates, and lower levels of bank lending and investor interest.
An off-setting new supply comes from UC Berkeley, with almost 4,000 new beds in dormitories under constuction, putting downward pressure on rental costs.
| Year | Reported Units Completed | Identified Duplicates | Actual Unique Units |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2025 | 493 units | -11 units | 482 units |
| 2024 | 708 units | 0 identified | 708 units |
| 2023 | 716 units | 0 identified | 716 units |
| 2022 | 828 units | 0 identified | 828 units |
| 2021 | (Broken Summary) | N/A | N/A |
| 2020 | 399 units | 0 identified | 399 units |
Interactive dashboard with sortable tables, timeline visualization, APR comparison, and height analysis.
Explore DataInteractive map of all Berkeley housing projects with status, units, and timeline data.
View MapExecute the full pipeline in Google Colab. No local setup required.
Open in ColabSource code, data files, and documentation for the complete analysis pipeline.
View CodeClick any notebook to open it directly in Google Colab:
| Stage | Notebook | Description | Run |
|---|---|---|---|
| 00 | explore_berkeley_housing | Open Berkeley housing pipeline in Google Earth (KML viewer notebook) | Colab |
| 00 | 00A_tour_of_the_pipeline | Non-technical tour of housing pipeline concepts | Colab |
| 00 | 00B_first_notebook_in_colab | Your first hands-on notebook - create data and charts | Colab |
| A | A1_data_sources_setup | Connect to Berkeley Open Data API, handle WAF blocks | Colab |
| A | A2_address_standardization | Normalize addresses (FIFTH ↔ 5TH, Ave ↔ AV) | Colab |
| A | A3_geocoding_pipeline | Match to lat/lon using 563K address lookup | Colab |
| A | A4_apn_enrichment | Match projects to Assessor Parcel Numbers | Colab |
| A | A5_buildingeye_import | Import permit dates from BuildingEye planning portal | Colab |
| A | A6_community_map_import | Parse Gellerman KML, extract news links from 203 projects | Colab |
| A | A7_comprehensive_integration | Fuzzy match and merge official + community data | Colab |
| A | A9_city_profile_builder | Generate city profile and setup checklist for adaptation | Colab |
| B | B1_lifecycle_tracking | Track permit stages: Zoning → Building → CO | Colab |
| B | B2_status_classification | Classify status into pipeline categories | Colab |
| B | B3_progress_indicators | Identify stalled projects (>180 days) | Colab |
| C | C0_methods_overview | Core methods: joins, aggregation, plotting | Colab |
| C | C1_pipeline_analysis | Projects by status, conversion rates | Colab |
| C | C2_timeline_analysis | Processing times, bottleneck identification | Colab |
| C | C3_proposal_vs_reality | RHNA tracking, "Making It Pencil" analysis | Colab |
| C | C4_quality_checks | Data validation: soft asserts, null checks, bounds | Colab |
| D | D1_monthly_report_generator | HTML/PDF/JSON report generation | Colab |
| D | D2_dashboard_data_export | SQLite + Datasette deployment | Colab |
| D | D3_alerts_monitoring | Status change alerts, milestone tracking | Colab |
| D | D4_hcd_apr_tables | Map pipeline data to HCD APR Table A2 fields | Colab |
| F | F1_development_math | Basic feasibility: TDC, NOI, Return on Cost | Colab |
| F | F2_pro_forma_transparent | Full pro forma with IRR, draw schedule, policy scenarios | Colab |
Progress toward California HCD Annual Progress Report requirements:
| Category | Coverage | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Direct mappings (year, address, permits) | 5 fields | Ready |
| Derivable (unit_category, SB35 flag) | 7 fields | Ready |
| APN (Assessor Parcel Number) | 96.5% | Ready |
| Income breakdown (VLI, LI, MOD) | 0% | Needs Data |
| Permit dates (entitlement, BP, CO) | 0% | In Progress |
Three ways to explore the data:
git clone https://github.com/blockXblock/berkeley-housing-analysis && jupyter lab MASTER_ANALYSIS.ipynbPlanned additions to expand the course:
| Module | Description | Status |
|---|---|---|
| E1: Environmental Overlays | CEQA, flood zones, historic districts | Planned |
| E2: Zoning Analysis | Parcel-level zoning constraints and allowed density | Planned |
| G1: Comparative Analysis | Cross-city benchmarking for Bay Area jurisdictions | Planned |
| Multi-City Network | Adapt pipeline for Oakland, SF, San Jose using city_template.yaml | Seeking Contributors |