Our people, our buildings, our streets, our businesses: their daily flows of energy, water, income and expense

What we found

The findings, each linked to its section, data and sources. Where the City's Vision 2050 work addressed the same question, it is cited.

What we could not find, and who has it

Notes

¹ From the spacing of the 4,499 wood utility poles that carry City streetlights: 185 overhead street miles at spans of 117–131 feet. Poles along rear lot lines are additional.
² PG&E's "average number of customers per residential transformer is 7" (2027 rate case, A.25-05-009, rebuttal Exhibit PG&E-18) applied to Berkeley's 49,700–55,500 homes; pole-top and underground units.
³ At $3.25 million a mile (PG&E's 2023–2025 average) to $6.1 million (the City's 2019 average, street lighting included), before inflation, engineering and building connections. Safety quotations: the City's 2018 Conceptual Study to Underground Utility Wires, citing FEMA's report on the 1991 Oakland fire.

Two findings note discrepancies we found in institutions' own documents: the City's 2016 undergrounding cost table and UC Berkeley's 2025 STARS energy entry. Both link to the documents.

Who lives in Berkeley

How many people live in Berkeley, in what kinds of homes, and how that has changed since 2020.

Population and homes, 2020–2026

2020 is the April 1 census; other years are January 1. The 2021 drop in group housing (20,925 to 14,527) is the campus emptying during the pandemic. Data: dof_e5_berkeley_2020_2026.csv

How Berkeley will grow if projects are built

Berkeley's population has been flat since 2020, at about 127,600, after a pandemic dip to 120,670 in 2021 when the campus emptied. Three plans point higher. The State requires Berkeley to plan for 8,934 new homes from 2023 to 2031. BerkeleyBuild's pipeline counts 11,442 homes approved or proposed but not yet built¹. And student housing is growing. Berkeley has about 9,800 student beds in university and nonprofit dormitories: about 9,000 run by UC Berkeley (about 6,100 on the Southside, about 1,100 on the Northside, 1,000 at Clark Kerr and 772 at Anchor House downtown), plus Bowles Hall (188) and International House (about 600)². Two UC buildings under construction add 2,738: Heumann House (1,113, fall 2027) and Bancroft-Fulton (1,625, fall 2028). A proposed building at Channing Way and Bowditch Street would add up to 2,000 more, for about 14,500 beds in all. If the pipeline were built at today's 2.13 people per home and the three dormitories were filled, Berkeley would gain about 24,400 residents in homes and about 4,700 in dormitories: about 157,000 people in all. That is a scenario, not a forecast; some approved projects will not be built, and many of UC's new beds will house students who now live in Berkeley apartments.

¹ Not yet built, excluding UC projects (BerkeleyBuild Pipeline Explorer, October 20, 2026). State target: the City's Annual Progress Report to the State, Table B.
² Beds inside Berkeley only. UC Berkeley 2021 Long Range Development Plan, Draft EIR, Table 5.12-5 (existing housing by facility, UC Berkeley 2020): Units 1–3, Beverly Cleary, Wada, Blackwell, Martinez Commons, Channing-Bowditch, Manville, Ida Jackson, Stern and Foothill, Clark Kerr (8,196), Bowles Hall (188), International House (620; "nearly 600" today); Anchor House FAQ (772, opened 2024). Not counted: UC housing in Albany (University Village, xučyun ruwway) and Emeryville (Intersection); two privately owned buildings UC leases to students (Enclave, Panoramic), whose beds are not published; and the Berkeley Student Cooperative (about 1,250 members). New buildings: UC Berkeley Housing, upcoming construction; Berkeley News, March 23, 2026.

Homes by type (Department of Finance, 2026)

The Census survey (ACS 2024 1-year) counts about 122,000 residents: a mid-2024 survey estimate, lower than the state's January 2026 figure, mainly in group housing. The tables below use the survey because only it describes residents (tenure, income, age, cars); use the state's totals for counts.

Who rents, who owns, and what they pay

Who rents and who owns, what homes cost, and what share of income rent takes.

Households split 54/46 toward renting, yet residents split evenly, because owner households are larger.

About 8,900 renter households, one in three, pay half their income or more in rent. Nearly half of Berkeley's homes (46%) were built before 1940.

Rents below market

A tenant moving into a Berkeley apartment today pays market rent: among tenancies begun in 2025 and 2026, a median of about $2,300 a month for a one-bedroom and $3,000 for a two-bedroom. Rent control holds a tenant's rent to small annual increases for as long as they stay; when they leave, state law lets the rent reset to market. So the rents that are far below market belong to tenants who have stayed a long time. Of about 21,500 rent-controlled apartments with tenants, about 7,200, more than one Berkeley rental in four, rent for at least 20% less than a new tenant would pay for the same size. A one-bedroom rented before 2000 has a median legal rent of $920.

Rents for new tenancies have been roughly flat in dollars since 2020, which means they have fallen after inflation. That is consistent with the dormitories opened since 2018 drawing students out of private apartments, though remote work and new apartment buildings pushed the same way; the comparison is worth repeating after the 2027 and 2028 dormitories open. Separately from rent control, 1,649 registered units carry a government subsidy: about 1,150 in buildings funded by affordable-housing programs (the City's Housing Trust Fund, low-income housing tax credits, project-based Section 8, HUD senior housing) and about 1,000 households using Section 8 vouchers in private apartments; the two overlap, and some nonprofit and public buildings do not register, so these counts are low. A count of income-restricted units in completed buildings awaits the City's inventory of its affordable-housing portfolio.

Rent Stabilization Board unit registry, snapshot July 13, 2026 (public records request #26-2375). Legal rent is the registered rent ceiling; "what a new tenant pays" is the median ceiling of tenancies begun in 2025–26 for the same number of bedrooms. Renter households: American Community Survey 2024. Data: rent_control_legal_rent_by_tenancy_start.csv

Household income, poverty and education

Household income, poverty and education, citywide; the same measures for each block group are in the data files.

Who is poor in Berkeley

About 19,200 Berkeley residents (18%) live below the federal poverty line, but the number mostly measures students. More than half of them, about 10,100, are college and graduate students living in apartments and houses (students in dormitories are not counted at all). The Census Bureau counts a student's own earnings, not the family support, loans or scholarships most depend on, so about half of off-campus students show up as poor. Among residents who are not in school, about 8,500, or 12%, are poor, a little above the California rate for the same group (11%). About 2,600 are 65 or older, one senior in eight, and about 900 are children, about one child in 18. Those are the residents for whom poverty means what the word suggests.

American Community Survey 2024 1-year estimates, tables B14006 (poverty by school enrollment) and B17001 (poverty by age); median incomes by tenure, table B25119. The first two rows plus poor schoolchildren (about 500) make up the total; the last two rows overlap them. Survey margins are wide: about ±2,200 for the students, ±1,900 for those not in school, and roughly ±700 for children, whose count is the least certain. California comparison: the same table for the state.

The income distribution is a barbell: about 14,700 households earn under $50,000 and about 14,900 earn $200,000 or more. Student households sit in the bottom band. Incomes are published for households, never individuals. Education rows for grades 1–11 are folded out of the table (they are in the data file).

A university city: ages and origins

The ages and origins of Berkeley residents.

Who comes in, who goes out, and what they do

Who comes into Berkeley to work, who leaves, where they come from and go, and how residents travel.

By day Berkeley gains about 27,500 workers, before counting 46,151 students. Counts are jobs covered by unemployment insurance and federal employment; the self-employed are not included.

Maps: jobs by census block, with coordinates and industry: lodes_2023_jobs_by_block.csv (1075 blocks). Jobs and employed residents by block group: lodes_2023_by_blockgroup.csv.

Cars, bikes and scooters

Vehicles registered by ZIP code and fuel, households without a car, and the bikes, e-bikes and scooters that are changing how people move.

Vehicles by ZIP code and fuel

To which addresses? Not public: the DMV releases registrations by ZIP code only, and a vehicle's registered address is confidential under the Vehicle Code (§1808.21). ZIP codes 94707 and 94708 include parts of Kensington and Albany, so ZIP totals slightly overstate Berkeley. Data: dmv_2026_by_zip.csv, dmv_2026_by_zip_fuel_duty.csv.

Bikes, e-bikes and scooters

About 4% of employed residents bike to work in the 2024 survey, and about 7% of those who still commute. Berkeley ranks well above Oakland, San Francisco and Portland, but below the college towns it is usually compared with. Its bike share has fallen since 2008–2012, when it was 8.1%, mostly because the count now includes the many who work from home. No survey counts bicycles owned in Berkeley; nationally, 51% of U.S. adults lived in a household with an adult bicycle in 2022 (PeopleForBikes survey).

Shared bikes are growing fast. Trips starting at Berkeley's 48 Bay Wheels stations rose from 87,853 in 2024 to 134,581 in 2025, and 75% of the 2025 trips were on e-bikes. The City allows up to 1,200 shared scooters and e-bikes, at most three operators, a $25,000 annual permit fee and $71 per device (2026 terms); Lime and VeoRide operate now. Ava Community Energy pledged $10 million for over 9,000 e-bike rebates across its territory (launched July 2025; about 600 a month).

What bikeways cost. Paint is cheap: a national study put the median cost of a painted bike lane at about $89,000 a mile. Concrete-separated lanes cost far more, because they rebuild curbs, drainage and signals: the Milvia Bikeway's construction contract was $3.5 million (2021); the Southside project, with two-way cycle tracks on Bancroft, Dana and Fulton plus repaving and bus lanes, about $16.5 million; and repaving 1.2 miles of Hopkins Street with bikeways is estimated at $14–15 million, against $11 million for repaving with pedestrian safety work alone. Separated bikeways grew from 0.1 to 3.6 miles between 2017 and 2024. The City's capital plan lists $163.1 million of bike and pedestrian need and funds $53.7 million over five years. Safety is the stake: people walking and biking are almost 80% of those killed or severely injured in collisions, while making up about 40% of trips (2013–2017).

Sources: U.S. Census American Community Survey 2020–2024 5-year (table B08301, via Census Reporter) and the Census Bureau's 2008–2012 commuting report; Berkeley Bike Plan update, FITES committee, July 2025; Bay Wheels public trip files (counted by BerkeleyBuild: trips starting at Berkeley stations, BK- prefix); City of Berkeley shared-mobility permit terms (2026); Ava Community Energy (July 2025); PeopleForBikes 2022 participation study; Milvia Bikeway contract (Council, January 26, 2021); Southside Complete Streets project page; Hopkins Corridor referral (Council, July 28, 2026); UNC Highway Safety Research Center, Costs for Pedestrian and Bicyclist Infrastructure Improvements (2013); Berkeley Vision Zero Action Plan.

The businesses: what they are and where

How many businesses are licensed in Berkeley, what kinds, where they are, and what they pay.

Berkeley's licensed businesses are mostly small: 5,034 are sole proprietorships, 4,838 corporations and 2,360 limited liability companies. Landlords are the second-largest group (3,176 rental-property licenses). Among businesses at a Berkeley address, therapists' and counselors' offices are the most common kind, followed by restaurants, beauty salons, architects and lawyers: a city of services, shops and professional practices around a university and a national laboratory. The neighborhood and type tables exclude rental-property licenses.

Source: City of Berkeley open data, Business Licenses (downloaded November 15, 2025); locations from the Alameda County Assessor's parcels. Maps: businesses_by_blockgroup.csv, businesses_by_neighborhood.csv, business_licenses_by_type.csv.

Ideas, parks and talent

The University's standing, the institutes and companies around it, the City's privacy rules, and its parks and waterfront.

Berkeley is small, about 128,000 people on ten square miles, and unusually rich in ideas, open space and talent.

Ideas

Around the campus and the Lab is a dense ring of institutes: the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing (since 2012, more than 3,400 long-term visiting researchers in its first decade), the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute (now SLMath) in the hills, Berkeley AI Research, the Center for Human-Compatible AI, founded to steer AI research toward "provably beneficial systems," the Institute of Governmental Studies (since 1919, home of the Berkeley IGS Poll), and the Othering & Belonging Institute. In 2023 the University created its first new college in more than 50 years, Computing, Data Science, and Society. At the Lab, the Doudna supercomputer, due in late 2026, will serve more than 11,000 researchers.

New companies

Research is turning into companies close to campus. Startups backed by Berkeley SkyDeck, the University's accelerator since 2012, have raised about $2.7 billion. Two buildings under way will add more room: the Bakar ClimatEnginuity Hub (145,000 square feet, up to 75 companies, opening 2027–28) and the IGI–Bakar Labs building for genomics and biotechnology (169,000 square feet, approved July 2025, opening 2028–29).

Privacy as a rule

Berkeley sets public limits on watching its residents. Its 2018 Surveillance Technology Use and Community Safety Ordinance requires the City to weigh "the impacts … on civil rights and civil liberties" and to report every November on each technology it uses; the 2024 report covered body-worn cameras, GPS trackers, fixed cameras, license-plate readers, street-level imagery and drones. In March 2026 the Council adopted principles for the City's own use of artificial intelligence and asked for citywide guidelines.

Parks, the waterfront and the environment

Berkeley has more than fifty parks, though at about 2 acres per 1,000 residents it falls short of the State's base standard of 3. Its waterfront adds 100 acres of parks and open space and 7 miles of trails, including a 90-acre park on a former landfill (renamed in 2026 the Park at the Berkeley Waterfront) and Aquatic Park; the Berkeley Marina, with about 1,000 berths, is the largest public marina on the Bay. Tilden Regional Park, one of the East Bay Regional Park District's three original parks, adjoins the city in the hills. The environmental record is long: the nation's first curbside recycling began here in 1973, through the Ecology Center; the City set a zero-waste goal in 2005; and in 2019 it barred natural gas in new buildings, a law a federal appeals court struck down in 2023.

Sources: UC Berkeley "By the numbers" and Berkeley News (October 8, 2025; June 15 and September 21, 2026); U.S. News & World Report; ShanghaiRanking; QS; Cal Athletics (August 13, 2024); all-time Summer Olympic medal table (Wikipedia, retrieved October 1, 2026, through the 2024 Games; Cal's count includes athletes who competed for other nations); Simons Institute; Center for Human-Compatible AI; Institute of Governmental Studies; Othering & Belonging Institute; Berkeley SkyDeck; Berkeley News (May 16, 2024) and Bakar Labs (Bakar buildings); Berkeley Lab (Doudna); City of Berkeley: parks, waterfront and marina pages, Council item 43 (June 25, 2024) on park standards, surveillance technology report (Council item 17, November 12, 2024); Ecology Center; City zero-waste resolution (2005); U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, California Restaurant Association v. City of Berkeley (April 17, 2023).

Streets, pipes and poles

The streets, water mains, sewers, storm drains, gas lines and poles under and over the city, how old they are, and what is not public.

Two City-commissioned counts of street miles disagree by 5 miles: 214.2 in the 2022 pavement survey and 219.4 in the 2016 undergrounding study. Neither report explains the difference; they were measured six years apart for different purposes.

The City's sewer map prices every segment at a planning cost per foot by diameter: $658.8 million for the whole network, including the 4,939 segments already relined with plastic (HDPE). It is a replacement value at the City's unit costs, not a backlog.

Who owns which pipes

How water reaches a tap. EBMUD's system is built on height. Its service area is divided into 120 pressure zones, from sea level to 1,450 feet; water is pumped up to tanks and reservoirs high in the hills, and flows down by gravity from zone to zone. About 60% of EBMUD's treated water reaches customers by gravity alone; 133 pumping plants lift the rest. Berkeley's mains fall in 15 of those zones (EBMUD 2025 Urban Water Management Plan; zone codes from the mapped mains).

Rain that leaks into old sewers is the overlap: in storms it overwhelms EBMUD's plant, and a 2014 federal consent decree requires the region to cut that inflow enough to end wet-weather discharges by 2035. Sources: City Sewer System Management Plan (2019); EBMUD 2025 Urban Water Management Plan and private sewer lateral program (2021); EBMUD consent decree (2014); City private sewer lateral guide; adopted FY2027–28 budget.

Overhead wire, poles and transformers

^a Links between neighboring lit wood poles up to 250–400 feet apart; poles without a streetlight break the chain. ^b 184.7 overhead street miles divided by the traced spans of 117–131 feet; rear-lot pole lines are additional. ^c PG&E's "average number of customers per residential transformer is 7" (2027 rate case, rebuttal testimony) over Berkeley's 49,700–55,500 homes; pole-top and underground units. ^d 185 miles × four systems on a typical shared pole (electric, telephone copper, cable TV coax, fiber).

The transformers. Distribution transformers are filled with mineral oil. Under federal rules (40 CFR 761.2), any made before July 2, 1979 whose PCB content has not been tested must be presumed PCB-contaminated, so the age of each unit matters, and PG&E does not publish it. System-wide, PG&E told regulators it is "tracking over 67,000 overloaded service transformers" while replacing 400 to 488 a year. Its wildfire filing counts 1,126 leaking-transformer events, none of which started a fire: the risk is oil on the ground, not ignition.

What would replace the estimates with counts: PG&E's pole and joint-use attachment records (its Joint Use Map Portal is closed to the public), which list every pole and every company attached to it. Wiring for traffic signals, sewer pump stations and water valves is not mapped publicly at all. Map layer: wood_pole_lines_traced.geojson.

Maps: miles of water main (and pre-1940 miles), sewer main and storm drain, and wood poles, for every block group and neighborhood: infrastructure_by_blockgroup.csv, infrastructure_by_neighborhood.csv. The segment-level layers are the City's own GIS services (PubWorks MapServer).

What it costs to bury the wires

How much of Berkeley still has overhead wires, and what the City's own studies say it costs to bury them.

Why it matters. The City's 2018 study makes the safety case: "Undergrounded wires don't fall down and block roadways." In the 1991 Oakland fire, as FEMA documented, "live power lines fell from burning poles, blocking streets and starting new fires," and when power to pumping stations was lost, firefighters ran out of water. First responders "will not drive over fallen power lines" until the utility confirms they are dead. In an earthquake, "poles have a tendency to sway in opposite directions causing wires to snap and throw sparks." Most of the overhead miles are residential streets, including the narrow hill streets that are the only ways out of the fire zones.

Every street, by class: underground and overhead (miles, 2016)

Miles computed from the feet in Table 1 of the City's 2016 study (the table prints 149.9 overhead residential miles; its feet give 146.9). The study measured residential streets but priced only arterials and collectors, and we found no City study that prices the rest. Lines along rear lot lines are not street miles and are not counted. We computed the 34.6 underground miles (16%) from the study's own feet, before reading the City's 2024 hazard plan; the plan gives the same figures.

The 2016 segment table: what it costs, street by street

The table prices Ashby Ave's five residential-zone segments at $5,387,150, then leaves them out of the street's total row ($2,478,100) and the arterial total. The collector network adds up to the dollar. Costs are construction only, in 2016 dollars: no private-property trenching, service conversions, engineering, financing or street lighting.

The 15 costliest overhead segments

Evacuation routes, 2019: cost per street

A mile costs $4.08 million on the simplest streets and $6.8 million on the hardest, lighting included. The City's 2018 Conceptual Study put its own share at $4.5–5.2 million a mile, $170–200 million for all 37.9 miles. PG&E ratepayer credits (Rule 20A) bring Berkeley about $533,000 a year; the $9,009,095 balance in 2019 was mostly committed to Underground Utility District 48 in the hills (Grizzly Peak, Summit, Senior, Avenida: 175 parcels).

What comes next, and what it would cost

The money that paid for most past undergrounding is ending. PG&E ratepayer credits under Rule 20A stopped accruing after 2022 under a 2021 state utilities commission decision, and unused credits expire by the end of 2033. Underground Utility District 48 in the hills, started in June 2023, is due to finish in 2026. The City's five-year capital plan budgets $0 for undergrounding each year against a $124.5 million need, and Measure U includes none. In January 2024 the Council asked PG&E to underground its lines in Berkeley's highest fire-risk zone, noting that a 2021 request got no reply. PG&E's ten-year undergrounding plan, filed September 30, 2026, would bury about 5,000 miles statewide between 2028 and 2037; its first projects include one in Alameda County, in Oakland, and none in Berkeley that we could identify.

For scale only: at the per-mile costs now in use, from PG&E's own recent average of $3.25 million to the City's 2019 average of $6.1 million (lighting included), burying the wires on all 185 overhead street miles would cost roughly $0.6 to $1.1 billion, before inflation. The evacuation routes alone, 16.9 miles, were priced at $127 million as a FY2023 capital program.

Sources: CPUC decisions D.21-06-013 and D.23-06-008; adopted FY2027–28 budget; Council item 28, January 30, 2024; PG&E 10-Year Electric Undergrounding Plan, Volume 1 (September 30, 2026).

Maps: undergrounding_segments_harris_2016.csv (191 segments, each named by street, from and to) and undergrounding_evacuation_routes_bellecci_2019.csv.

What the city uses, and what can be known

How much water and power Berkeley uses, and what can be known about use by building, block or neighborhood.

Large buildings: energy reported under the City's Building Emissions Saving Ordinance

Year-to-year totals move with the number of buildings reporting. The City's file labels gas for 2021–2023 as kBtu, but its own energy-intensity figures are reproduced only if those values are therms, so they are treated as therms here. Every building, with address, type, floor area, use 2021–2024 and ENERGY STAR score, located on its Assessor parcel (449 of 519): beso_large_buildings_energy.csv.

Can use be seen by building, block, street or neighborhood?

PG&E's ZIP-code files sit behind a short registration form (CPUC decision D.14-05-016) and have not yet been downloaded. Finer grain needs a request: aggregated use by block group from PG&E, or the City's metered total from EBMUD under the Public Records Act.

The dangers, and what is being done

The three disasters Berkeley plans for: how likely each is, who and what is exposed, and the steps taken so far.

Earthquake

The Hayward Fault runs along the foot of the hills. The U.S. Geological Survey puts the chance of a magnitude 6.7 or larger earthquake on the Hayward or Rodgers Creek faults at 33% for 2014–2043, and anywhere in the Bay Area at 72%. For a large Hayward Fault earthquake (scenarios of magnitude 6.9 to 7.0), the City's hazard plan estimates about 100 deaths in Berkeley, 3,000 to 12,000 households displaced, over $2 billion in building damage, 620 buildings destroyed, 29,000 homes without power, and 1,800 breaks and 3,900 leaks in EBMUD's pipes, with water out for 6 weeks, some as long as 6 months. The land west of San Pablo Avenue is in the liquefaction zone, along with 101 miles (39%) of the City's sewers; 50 miles of sewer lie in the hills' earthquake-landslide zone.

Fire

Hill Fire Zones 2 and 3 hold 8,603 parcels and about 32,100 residents. The 1923 fire destroyed 584 structures and left about 4,000 people homeless; 1,858 buildings stand in its footprint today. The 1991 Tunnel Fire in the Oakland hills killed 25. Measure FF (2020, 74.2% of the vote) funds fire prevention: $12.7 million collected in FY2022, $9.3 million in FY2023, about $11.0 million expected in FY2026. The Fire Department inspects about 8,600 hill parcels a year; a $2.8 million state grant (2024–2026) funds work on Grizzly Peak and evacuation routes; a 2025 ordinance sets ember-resistant zones next to homes; and in January 2024 the Council asked PG&E to underground its lines in the highest-risk zone.

Time to clear each area (hours:minutes)

Weekday and weekend columns are midday. Times are for the 90th-percentile vehicle; * marks the 100th percentile (the last vehicle), used where it governs. "Urgent mobilization" assumes residents leave within 30 minutes. KLD Table 7-4: evacuation_clearance_times_kld_2025.csv.

How many cars leave the hills? The study counts vehicles, not parked cars: each household is assumed to drive out 1.14 vehicles, and workers, visitors and students drive out too. For the North and South Berkeley Hills together it counts about 17,900 evacuating vehicles at the busiest time of day (about 13,000 and 4,900), about 11,500 of them residents'. A repeat of the 1923 fire, which burned from the hills into the neighborhoods north of campus, would send about 28,000 vehicles onto the roads, about 10,300 from households in Fire Zones 2 and 3; the rest come from the flats and the campus area inside the fire's path. The study's often-quoted "approximately 90,000 vehicles" is a citywide evacuation: residents' cars (about 48,000), commuters who work here (up to about 15,000), college students (about 15,000), visitors (about 14,000) and others, plus about 48,000 more passing through. Many hill residents work elsewhere, so at midday on a weekday fewer hill households are home, and more commuters' cars are in the flats.

Flood, tsunami and the rising Bay

The Bay has risen about eight inches since 1900. The City's plan finds that 5.5 feet of rise with a 25-year storm could flood Interstate 80 and as far east as Fifth Street, and that at 48 inches of rise, groundwater surfaces in West Berkeley north of University Avenue. Vision 2050 cited the State's range of 1.1 to 2.7 feet of rise by 2050. A tsunami would reach the shoreline first: about 1,400 residents in about 500 households live in the inundation zone, about 6,800 people are there by day, and about 450 businesses employ about 4,800; the Marina has 113 households living aboard. Inland, the storm drains were built for a 10-year storm; many parts over 90 years old; the 2022–23 storms brought more than 15 inches of rain in 20 days. The 100-year floodplain follows the shoreline, Aquatic Park, and Codornices and Strawberry creeks. The City's Stormwater Master Plan, due at the end of 2025, is still being prepared; no cost figure has been published.

The hazard plan, and the federal money it unlocks

A current hazard plan is required for federal mitigation grants. The City's 2024 plan lists 33 mitigation actions. Its predecessor lapsed before the update was adopted:

Whether the 98-day gap cost Berkeley a grant is not on the record. FEMA's data shows one Berkeley application, $5 million for seismic retrofits of private buildings (DR-4699-0014), closed unfunded on December 12, 2024, two days after the lapse, with no reason recorded; a near-identical $5 million application under another disaster remains pending. The most recent approval was $6,000,000 for seismic retrofits ($4,500,000 federal), approved in March 2023. Still pending: $4,000,000 (structural retrofitting/rehabilitating private structures, Berkeley, DR-4407-0090); $5,000,000 (structural retrofitting/rehabilitating private structures, Berkeley, DR-4683-0087-R); $817,040 (vegetation management, Hillside Association of Berkeley, DR-4856-0078); $8,000,000 (retrofitting private structures, Berkeley, DR-4856-0083-R) (the 2025 wildfire applications also appear under a second disaster number, 5545). All applications since 1990: fema_hazard_mitigation_berkeley.csv.

Sources: City of Berkeley 2024 Local Hazard Mitigation Plan, adopted March 18, 2025 (Council item 09) and the 2019 plan; USGS Fact Sheet 2016-3020 (Bay Area earthquake probabilities, 2014–2043); City of Berkeley soft-story inventory, status as of July 23, 2026; Measure FF reports to Council, December 3, 2024 and June 24, 2025; Fire Department wildfire memo, August 25, 2023; City Evacuation StoryMaps (July 2025) and the KLD Evacuation Time Estimate Study (2025); OpenFEMA Hazard Mitigation Assistance Projects (fetched 2026-10-01).

UC Berkeley and Berkeley Lab, counted on their own

What the campus and the Lab use and emit, how many buildings they run, and the plan to retire the campus's gas plant.

The University and the Lab run their own power, steam, roads and parking. The City's figures leave them out: its greenhouse-gas inventory excludes both, and its maps stop at their boundaries. The Lab straddles the city line, its western half in Berkeley and its eastern half in Oakland.

Together the two emitted 195,885 tonnes of CO₂e in 2024, equal to 45% of the City's community inventory (432,806 tonnes, 2023); the inventories are compiled differently. The campus's own inventory page gives 160,270 tonnes, counting before 2,090 tonnes of offsets.

Retiring the gas plant

The plant produced 114,262 of the campus's 160,270 tonnes in 2024. The Berkeley Clean Energy Campus project replaces it with an electric heating and cooling plant under North Field, north of Hearst Gym, with a playing field on its roof, a 2-million-gallon chilled-water tank, and new hot- and cold-water piping to about 32 buildings. The State is paying $249 million of the $476.6 million first phase. The date has moved:

The geothermal wells drew on Professor Kenichi Soga's 400-foot test borehole; the July 2025 scope was trimmed "to align with the approved project budget." Until the new plant runs, the gas plant does.

What the two report on their own sustainability

Both report every year to the UC Office of the President (the UC Annual Report on Sustainable Practices); the Lab also files a Site Sustainability Plan with the Department of Energy, and the campus reports to AASHE's STARS, the national rating for colleges: Platinum, 86.76 points (submitted February 19, 2025, valid through April 20, 2028), the first STARS 3.0 Platinum. AASHE now shows each credit's data only after a login; the figures below are the UC report's own data, read from the public spreadsheets behind its charts.

Metric tons of CO₂e. The campus's emissions are mostly Scope 1, gas burned on site; the Lab's are mostly Scope 2, purchased electricity. Scope 3 (commuting, air travel, waste) changed method in 2019 and fell during the pandemic. All years 2009–2024, with energy intensity: campus_lab_emissions_energy_2009_2024.csv.

¹ Best estimate: the gas implied by the campus's own reported emissions from burning fuel on site (134,957 tonnes of CO₂e in 2023, at its factor of 53.02 kg per MMBtu, about 746,000 MWh), plus purchased electricity, solar and heating oil. That is about 170 kBtu per square foot, consistent with the 163 the UC system reports for 2023. One of the several published figures appears about ten times too low: the campus's 2025 STARS report gives 78,414 MWh, including only 30,014 MWh of gas, while calling the gas-fired plant "the primary source for electricity and heating." Data: stars_2025_ucb_operations.csv.

² About 100 (campus energy staff, ACEEE 2024 paper) or about 150 (U.S. Department of Energy Better Buildings partner page) on the core campus; the campus's 1,095 acres include the hill campus and outlying stations.

Not published: the campus's total electricity use (the plant's own generation is reported nowhere), miles of steam lines and tunnels, and how the campus and Lab land divides between Berkeley and Oakland. Under a 2021 settlement the University pays the City about $82.6 million over 16 years (press reports; the agreement itself was not available).

UC Berkeley's payments to the City and County

How much the University pays the City and County each year, under what agreement, for what, and what the City gave up in return.

The University's payment to the City is about $4.8 million a year now, rising to about $6.4 million by 2036. The agreement calls the payment "intended to be comprehensive." In return the City agreed not to sue over the University's development plan, its housing projects or "any enrollment decision," though it may end the agreement if undergraduate enrollment grows more than 1% a year. The 2005 agreement it replaced paid $1,520,124 in FY2014–15. Other payments exist but their amounts are not published. The City spends the money mainly on fire services: $3.4 million of the fund's $5.75 million in FY2025 spending went to public safety, and the FY2027 budget shifts two firefighter positions onto it.

Sources: City–University settlement agreement (2021), printed as Attachment D to the City's December 29, 2023 collaborative-planning framework; City annual financial reports FY2024 and FY2025 (UC Settlement Fund); City sewer service fee schedule; Council item 05, April 12, 2022 (parking tax); California State Auditor report 2015-106 (March 2016); Alameda County Fire Department board item, December 6, 2022 (Berkeley Lab contract); Berkeley Daily Planet, August 1, 2021 (the 2019 fiscal study). Schedule: uc_settlement_payments_2021_2036.csv.

Parcels and taxable value

What the County assesses Berkeley's land and buildings at, who is exempt, and how value spreads across neighborhoods.

Under Proposition 13, assessed value follows the purchase price plus at most 2% a year, so it sits far below market value, most of all for long-held homes.

By neighborhood

Neighborhoods are the City's own boundaries; parcels outside every polygon are not in this table. Maps: assessor_by_blockgroup.csv, assessor_by_neighborhood.csv, assessor_by_fire_zone.csv.

Staff, pensions, deficits and the capital gap

How many people the City employs, what it spends and on what, its pension and overtime costs, its deficits, and the gap between its capital needs and its funding.

Staff, by department

The FY2027 budget cuts 164.33 positions: 45 vacant positions frozen in FY2026, 85 more vacant and 20 filled. Police lose 30 positions and Fire 24. Another 33 positions are carried on one-time money pending a proposed sales tax; without it, the cut reaches 183 positions.

Pensions and overtime

The City paid CalPERS $77.9 million in FY2025, up from $36.8 million in FY2016; the City Auditor cites a forecast rising "from $76 million in FY 2025 to $108 million in FY 2034." The police plan's employer rate is above 80% of payroll. Overtime: the Police Department expected about $9.3 million in FY2025, 40% of it to backfill minimum staffing, and Fire about $7.9 million; the Auditor found a "$10.6 million increase in Police and Fire overtime expenditures from FY 2016 to FY 2025," and that police overtime exceeded its budget three years running.

The capital gap, by the City's own count

The City's five-year capital plan puts its total need at $2.1 billion and funds $406.7 million. Because the funded work only keeps pace with inflation, the unfunded gap does not shrink: $2.11 billion in FY2027, $2.12 billion in FY2031. Public Works separately reports "$1.8 billion in deferred maintenance costs and needed improvements." Sewers are the one category close to funded, paid by sewer fees; undergrounding, the Veterans Building and Old City Hall get nothing. Streets average a pavement condition of 56; the five-year paving plan costs $250 million.

Measure U against the need. The $300 million bond on the November 2026 ballot would fund $272.5 million of projects (parks $90.7 million, public works $75.1 million, fire $106.7 million) plus $40.5 million for staffing and delivery. Issued in stages from 2027 and repaid through FY2066–67, it costs $610 million in debt service. That is about 14% of the need the City itself lists, and it includes no undergrounding. Vision 2050 had put the unfunded need at $882 million in 2020. Data: city_capital_needs_fy2027_2031.csv.

Sources: City of Berkeley adopted FY2027-28 budget and FY2027-31 Capital Improvement Program (Council, June 23, 2026); Budget & Finance Policy Committee presentation, May 14, 2026; FY2025 Annual Comprehensive Financial Report; CalPERS actuarial valuations as of June 30, 2025; City Auditor, Berkeley's Financial Condition FY2016–FY2025 (April 2026); Police and Fire mid-biennial budget presentations (May 22, 2025); Measure U resolution (Council item 38, June 16, 2026) and project list (February 2026).

What is changing next

The changes already under way that will reshape streets, power and water: electric cars, e-bikes, working from home, an electric campus, undergrounding.

Several changes already under way will reshape how Berkeley uses its streets, pipes and power lines.

Vision 2050 anticipated most of these in 2020: buildings that make and store their own energy, transportation that must "become electrified," ride-hailing and micro-mobility that "will become more prevalent," and microgrids "capable of providing electricity even when the larger grid is down." What it could not foresee was the scale of working from home, now about as common as driving alone to work. Sources: DMV registrations by ZIP code (January 2021 and January 2026); the sections above.

Every file behind this report

Every data file behind this report, what each holds, and where each source came from.

Every table above comes from these files. Each is keyed by a geography a map can join on: census block group or tract (GEOID, matching the boundary files), census block with coordinates, ZIP code, the City's neighborhoods, the County parcel, or a named street segment. Two boundary files carry every census indicator already attached: berkeley_blockgroups.geojson and berkeley_tracts.geojson.

Sources, pinned

Downloaded 2026-10-01 by scripts/snapshot/pull_sources.py; each file's SHA-256 is recorded so any figure can be traced to the exact file. Census block-group tables (one request each) are pinned in the manifest too. Population in group housing is not published at block-group grain.

• Already in the repository: Alameda County Assessor parcels (February 2026, data.acgov.org); City of Berkeley GIS layers for water mains, sewers, storm drains, streetlights, neighborhoods and hill fire zones (2026-08-30); City open data, BESO energy (5vy5-rwja).
• City of Berkeley, 2022 Pavement Management Program update (P-TAP 23 final report). City of Berkeley Sewer System Management Plan. UC Berkeley Office of Planning & Analysis, Quick Facts (fall 2025 enrollment); Berkeley News, July 29, 2026 (fall 2026 admission offers); Berkeley News, August 26, 2026 (Fall Convocation: "over 9,000" new students); Berkeley News, March 23, 2026 (9,700 undergraduates in campus housing); IPEDS 2024-25 (faculty and staff).
• KLD Associates, City of Berkeley Evacuation Time Estimate Study, TR-1296, July 1, 2025 (Tables 3-14, 6-6, 7-4; section 10.2); City of Berkeley Evacuation StoryMaps (text version, July 2025); Community Wildfire Protection Plan (2023).
• Harris & Associates, Baseline Study for the Development of a Utility Undergrounding Program, July 22, 2016 (Appendix A of the City's January 2018 Conceptual Study to Underground Utility Wires). Public Works, Disaster and Fire Safety, and Transportation Commissions, Conceptual Study to Underground Utility Wires in Berkeley (Phase 2), January 2018, Table 8. Bellecci & Associates, Projected Costs of Undergrounding Utilities along City of Berkeley's Evacuation Routes, December 2019 (Transportation Commission packet, January 16, 2020). District 48: CEQA Notice of Exemption, January 15, 2019; CPUC Draft Resolution E-4993, October 10, 2019.
• University and Lab: UC Regents item F4, July 21, 2021 (LRDP: 1,095 acres; Table 1-2: 2018-19 floor area, beds, parking, staff); UC Berkeley 2021 LRDP Draft EIR, Table 5.12-5 (existing housing by facility, UC Berkeley 2020); Anchor House FAQ (772 beds); UC Berkeley 2021 LRDP EIR, greenhouse-gas appendix (2018 water and natural gas); UC Berkeley Office of Sustainability, greenhouse gas inventory (2019-2024); UC Regents item F2, July 16, 2025 (Berkeley Clean Energy Campus); ACEEE 2024 paper by campus staff (core campus, cogeneration); UC 2025 Annual Report on Sustainable Practices (commuting; per-campus chart data from its public Google Sheets, fetched 2026-10-01); AASHE STARS, UC Berkeley 2025 report (submitted February 19, 2025): credits OP-3, OP-5, OP-6, OP-14 and PRE-3, saved 2026-10-01 with a signed-in account; UC Berkeley Clean Energy Campus fact sheet, April 5, 2023 (sustainability.berkeley.edu); UC Regents item F4, May 15, 2024 (Phase 1 budget, geothermal wells); cleanenergycampus.berkeley.edu (schedule, viewed 2026-10-01); STARS 2025 review template (completion-date note); Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory 2025 LRDP Draft EIR, April 2025 (people, energy, water, GHG, parking); UC Regents item F1B, September 17, 2025 (202 acres, buildings, floor area).
• EBMUD 2025 Urban Water Management Plan (pinned in the manifest) and EBMUD service-area page. EBMUD presentation to the Berkeley City Council, June 11, 2019: "Typical water use in Berkeley is about 5 CCF per month". City of Berkeley, Climate Action Plan and Resilience Update, Council item 23, April 15, 2025 (community inventory; UC Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory excluded).
• Large buildings: City of Berkeley Building Emissions Saving Ordinance data. Vehicles: California DMV, Vehicle Fuel Type Count by ZIP Code. Commuting and jobs: U.S. Census LEHD LODES 8 (2023). Residents: U.S. Census American Community Survey via Census Reporter; California Department of Finance E-5.