More homes, healthy neighborhoods: what Berkeley's own records say works.
With careful design, Berkeley can grow and innovate — new homes, thriving businesses, sound city finances, stronger critical infrastructure — while keeping what makes Berkeley unique.
A flyby of every Berkeley building by Patrick Kennedy's Panoramic Interests, 1990–2028 — from the 6-unit Henry Court to the proposed tower at 2274 Shattuck. Roughly 700 homes built across three decades, with 360° orbits of the largest projects.
June, 2026 Shattuck Avenue building pipeline: all projects Entitled or In Review.
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.
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.
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 EarthQuery the housing record directly in your browser — no records request, no installation. One-click questions (the waiting room, the stage clock, density-bonus projects) and a guided case-file notebook for the 2700 Shattuck story.
Open the reporters page →Every 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 →The original analysis write-up, APR correction tables, and full notebook index. Preserved while its text is reverified against the updated permit-level data.
Open the archive →