Berkeley, California

• 1. Introduction

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  Berkeley, California sits on the eastern shore of San Francisco Bay, a city of 124,321 people whose name traces back to a quote from an 18th-century Irish bishop. In 1866, a man named Frederick Billings stood at a place called Founders' Rock and watched two ships sail through the Golden Gate. He recalled a line from the philosopher George Berkeley: "westward the course of empire takes its way." That moment of literary inspiration gave a name to a city that would spend the next century and a half earning a global reputation for things Billings could never have anticipated.

  The city that carries George Berkeley's name has been the site of the Free Speech Movement, the birthplace of California cuisine, the home of a national laboratory that helped build the atomic bomb, and the first city in the United States to pass a sanctuary resolution. It was where the element berkelium was named. It was where rent control, domestic partnership law, and soda taxes were pioneered before they spread elsewhere.

  How did a small settlement on a creek north of Oakland become a permanent laboratory for social change? And what is the cost of that reputation, in housing, in homelessness, in the constant friction between preservation and growth? Those are the questions this documentary will follow.

• 2. Before the University

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  Before Frederick Billings quoted a philosopher at Founders' Rock, the land belonged to the Chochenyo and Huchiun Ohlone people. Their presence is still readable in the landscape: pits worn into rock formations where they ground acorns, wildflower seeds, grass seeds, and squirrel fat; a shellmound along the shoreline of San Francisco Bay at the mouth of Strawberry Creek, now mostly leveled and paved over; and human remains unearthed in West Berkeley and along Strawberry Creek on the university campus.

  The first people of European descent arrived with the De Anza Expedition in 1776 and helped establish the Spanish Presidio of San Francisco. Among those soldiers was Luis Peralta, who was eventually granted a vast stretch of land on the eastern shore of the bay. He named it Rancho San Antonio, running cattle for meat and hides, and later gave portions to each of his four sons. What is now Berkeley fell mostly to his son Domingo, with a small portion going to his son Vicente. Their names survive in Berkeley street names today, even though no physical structure from either ranch remains.

  The ranch era ended abruptly. After California passed from Spanish to Mexican sovereignty following the Mexican War of Independence, the gold rush and American annexation brought squatters and legal disputes that rapidly stripped the Peralta brothers of nearly everything. Domingo and Vicente were left with small reservations near their respective ranch homes. The rest was parceled out to American claimants. Legal title to all land in Berkeley still traces back to the original Peralta land grant, a fact that quietly anchors the city's entire property system to a colonial transfer the Peraltas never truly chose.

• 3. The University Shapes the City

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  Oakland's private College of California chose its new site in 1866, settling on land along Strawberry Creek at an elevation of roughly 500 feet above the bay. The college's plan to fund construction by selling adjacent parcels created the street grid that still defines modern Berkeley. When those land sales fell short, the college partnered with the State of California, and in 1868 the University of California was born.

  The university pulled everything toward it. A horsecar ran from Oakland's Temescal neighborhood along what is now Telegraph Avenue to the campus. The first post office opened in 1872. In 1876, a branch of the Central Pacific Railroad reached downtown Berkeley from a junction at a place then called Shellmound, now part of Emeryville. Electric lights and the telephone arrived by 1888, early even by national standards. Electric streetcars replaced horsecars.

  The 1906 San Francisco earthquake accelerated this growth in unexpected ways. Berkeley and the East Bay escaped serious damage, and thousands of refugees crossed the bay. Among them were most of San Francisco's painters and sculptors. Between 1907 and 1911, they created one of the largest art colonies west of Chicago. Artist and critic Jennie V. Cannon documented the founding of the Berkeley Art Association and the competing studios and clubs that emerged in that period.

  The university's pull was not always benign. In 1916, Berkeley implemented single-family zoning, a policy described as the first such implementation in the United States. Its stated purpose was to exclude minorities from white neighborhoods. By 2021, nearly half of Berkeley's residential neighborhoods were still exclusively zoned for single-family homes, a century-long consequence of a discriminatory ordinance. In 2025, Berkeley legalized small multi-family buildings across most of the city, a reversal that took more than a hundred years.

• 4. Fire, Fault Lines, and Fog

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  On the 17th of September 1923, a fire swept down from the Berkeley Hills toward the university campus and downtown. Around 640 structures burned before a late-afternoon sea breeze allowed firefighters to stop it. The same pattern nearly repeated on the 20th of October 1991, when gusty, hot winds fanned a fire along the Berkeley-Oakland border. Twenty-five people were killed, 150 were injured, and 2,449 single-family dwellings and 437 apartment and condominium units were destroyed.

  The fires come from the same seasonal rhythm that defines Berkeley's climate. The city has a warm-summer Mediterranean pattern, with cool, wet winters and warm, dry summers. Its location directly opposite the Golden Gate means fog pours through more reliably than in neighboring cities. The warmest months run from June through September, with September typically the hottest. In an average year, the temperature reaches 90 degrees Fahrenheit on fewer than three days. The record high was 107 degrees Fahrenheit, recorded on both the 15th of June 2000 and the 16th of July 1993. The record low was 24 degrees Fahrenheit on the 22nd of December 1990.

  Beneath this climate runs a more permanent threat. The Hayward Fault Zone, a major branch of the San Andreas Fault, runs directly through Berkeley. A notorious segment passes lengthwise down the middle of Memorial Stadium on the university campus; photos and measurements document the fault's ongoing movement through the structure itself. No large earthquake has occurred on the Hayward Fault near Berkeley in recorded history, though one in 1836 is considered possible. Seismologists assess the probability of a magnitude 6.7 or greater earthquake in the Bay Area within the next thirty years as likely, with the Hayward Fault carrying the highest likelihood of any fault in the region of being the epicenter. In 1868, an earthquake on the southern segment of the Hayward Fault destroyed the Alameda County seat in San Leandro and was felt strongly enough in San Francisco to be called, before 1906, the Great San Francisco earthquake. That quake also destroyed the adobe home of Domingo Peralta in north Berkeley.

• 5. The Sixties and Their Aftermath

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  In the fall of 1964, the University of California provoked a massive student protest by banning the distribution of political literature on campus. The ban built on a policy UC President Clark Kerr had established in 1959 restricting student political activities and organizations. The resulting Free Speech Movement transformed Berkeley's national image in a way that has not faded since.

  What followed was a rapid sequence of confrontations. As the Vietnam War escalated, student activism intensified, much of it organized by the Vietnam Day Committee. By 1967-1969, Telegraph Avenue had become a focal point for the hippie movement spreading east from San Francisco, and the overlap between counterculture drop-outs and the radical left was substantial. The flashpoint that defined the era locally was a parcel of university land south of the campus that came to be called People's Park. The fight over its use brought the National Guard to Berkeley for a month, under orders from Governor Ronald Reagan. The park stayed undeveloped for decades.

  The 1960s left a specific demographic mark. In 1950, the Census Bureau had recorded Berkeley's population as 11.7% Black and 84.6% white. During the 1940s and after the war, large numbers of African Americans had migrated to Berkeley, many drawn by war industry jobs in the region. By 2010, Berkeley's Black population had fallen to less than 10% of the city, and historically Black neighborhoods such as the Adeline Corridor saw a 50% decline in Black and African American residents between 1990 and 2010, driven by gentrification and rising housing costs.

  The political transformation of those years reshaped local government permanently. Berkeley's last Republican mayor, Wallace J. S. Johnson, left office in 1971. In 1984, Progressives took a majority on the city council for the first time, and Nancy Skinner became the first UC Berkeley student elected to the council. That same year, Berkeley's Domestic Partner Task Force, established in 1983, saw its policy recommendations pass into law, creating legislation that became a model for similar measures across the country.

• 6. Firsts and Policy Experiments

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  Berkeley passed the first sanctuary resolution in the United States on the 8th of November 1971. In 1973, the Ecology Center launched the first curbside recycling program in the country. Styrofoam was banned in 1988. On the 18th of September 2012, Berkeley proclaimed September 23 as a day recognizing bisexuals, claiming the distinction of being the first city in the country to do so. On the 4th of November 2014, Berkeley voters approved the Measure D soda tax, the first such tax in the United States.

  Some of these firsts came with costs. The 1916 single-family zoning ordinance was, by the source's account, the first of its kind in the United States, and it served explicitly as a tool of racial exclusion. In 1980, residents voted for rent control and vacancy control. Both policies were later constrained by California's Costa-Hawkins Rental Housing Act, which came into effect in 1995 and limited rent control to units built before the local law was enacted. By 2015, Alameda County rents had increased by 25% in a single year, while the average household income grew by only 5%.

  The policy experiments extended to governance itself. In 1909, following public referendums, the Town of Berkeley became the City of Berkeley. In 2014, Berkeley created the nation's first student supermajority district with District 7. In 2018, that district elected Rigel Robinson, a 22-year-old UC Berkeley graduate who became the youngest councilmember in the city's history. Berkeley also operates one of only four municipally run public health agencies in California, giving it a level of local control over public health that most California cities do not have. In 1908, a statewide referendum to move the California state capital to Berkeley was defeated by roughly 33,000 votes; the streets that had been named for California counties in anticipation of the capitol still carry those names.

• 7. Homelessness as a Recurring Crisis

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  Berkeley's 2017 annual homeless report estimated that on any given night, 972 people were homeless in the city. Sixty-eight percent of them, around 664 people, were unsheltered, living in cars or on streets. Long-term homelessness in Berkeley was double the national average at that time, with 27% of the city's homeless population facing chronic homelessness.

  The crisis has deep roots. In the 1960s, homelessness in Berkeley was partly framed as a voluntary lifestyle, an expression of counterculture. People's Park, created in 1969, became a haven for, in the source's words, "small-time drug dealers, street people, and the homeless," and remained one of the few relatively safe gathering spaces for unhoused people in the Bay Area for decades. The 1970s brought a gradual shift in public perception as it became clear that homelessness affected not only single men but also women, children, and families.

  In 1994, Berkeley City Council considered anti-homeless laws that the San Francisco Chronicle described as among the strictest in the country. They prohibited sitting, sleeping, and begging in public, including panhandling near park benches, newspaper racks, and movie lines. In February 1995, the American Civil Liberties Union sued the city over the anti-panhandling provision. The following month, the Street Spirit, a newspaper written for and by people experiencing homelessness, published its first issue. In May of that year, a federal judge ruled the anti-panhandling law violated the First Amendment but left the anti-sitting and anti-sleeping ordinances intact.

  The city established a Homeless Task Force, headed by then-Councilmember Jesse Arreguín, to develop recommendations. An 18-month effort beginning in 2008 focused on chronic homelessness produced a 48% decline in the chronically homeless population counted in the 2009 point-in-time survey. The number of "hidden homeless" individuals, those staying with friends or relatives rather than in permanent housing, increased significantly in the same period, a reminder that reductions in street counts do not always reflect reductions in the underlying problem.

• 8. Notable Residents and Lasting Marks

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  The element berkelium was synthesized using the 60-inch cyclotron at UC Berkeley and named in 1949, placing the city permanently in the periodic table. J. Robert Oppenheimer was a UC professor and Berkeley resident before moving on to a role that shaped the outcome of World War II. Ernest Lawrence, who built the cyclotron that made berkelium possible, also called Berkeley home.

  The city's influence on food culture runs through a single address. Alice Waters opened Chez Panisse in 1971, and the restaurant is credited with creating California cuisine. Peet's Coffee's original store is in Berkeley. The 924 Gilman Street venue became a foundational site for punk rock. Fantasy Studios, operated by Saul Zaentz, recorded music that shaped multiple genres.

  People who were born in or lived in Berkeley include Kamala Harris, Steve Wozniak, Ben Affleck, Andy Samberg, Billie Joe Armstrong of Green Day, Adam Duritz of Counting Crows, and authors Ursula K. Le Guin and Michael Chabon. Berkeley High School, established in 1880, currently enrolls over 3,000 students and was designated a historic district by the National Register of Historic Places on the 7th of January 2008.

  Berkeley has 18 sister cities, a network that began with Sakai, Japan in 1966. The Graduate Theological Union, located a block north of the UC Berkeley campus, holds the largest number of students and faculty of any religious studies doctoral program in the United States. The Freight and Salvage music venue is the oldest established full-time folk and traditional music venue west of the Mississippi River. Each of these facts points to a city whose ambitions have consistently outrun its geography, a place that measures itself against the whole country rather than just the bay it sits beside.