Data
Including the ones this site refuses to publish, and why.
Week of October 5–11, 2026 · Updated Friday, October 9, 2026 · Source: Berkeley's agenda listing (live)
Where the numbers about Berkeley actually live, what each source will not tell you, and the two or three things that are quietly wrong if nobody warns you about them.
Berkeley runs a real, live Socrata open-data portal with 66 datasets at data.cityofberkeley.info. The city also keeps a landing page for it.
Note the host. The city’s main site was renamed to berkeleyca.gov and
the data portal did not follow. data.berkeleyca.gov has no
DNS record at all — it does not fail politely, it does not resolve. If
you see that address anywhere, including in something this site’s own
code generated, it is wrong. The legacy host is the live one.
Two datasets change every day. They are the reason the portal is worth opening at all.
p88g-6gs2, refreshed
daily, on the order of twenty thousand rows. Potholes, encampments, illegal
dumping, streetlights: the closest thing Berkeley has to a public record of
what residents are actually complaining about. The single most useful file
on the portal.rwnf-bu3w, refreshed
daily, on the order of thirteen thousand rows. A rough census of what is
open, and a usable proxy for commercial-corridor health.iknk-w4qw, with the map twin
2dtu-vge3. Updated when the zoning changes, which recently has
meant more often than usual.9a47-nj4i.5vy5-rwja
for buildings of 15,000 square feet and up, with a GIS-shaped twin at
9is9-7t5k.b2uf-vm3c, exactly eight
rows. The file’s metadata was touched more recently, but the data
itself has not changed since the current map took effect, and that is
correct: boundaries only move at redistricting, once a decade. This is the
authoritative answer to “which district am I in”. If you want a
lookup rather than a shapefile, the city runs one at
Council District Lookup.This is where the portal will mislead you if you sort by the wrong column. Socrata shows two timestamps — when the metadata record was last touched, and when the data last changed. Dozens of these files show a recent metadata date and have not had a new row in years.
bhxd-e6up. The most-used GIS layer
on the portal, and its data has not moved in about six years.About half the portal is duplicated GIS layers published under two
different ID families — a “map” asset and a
“dataset” asset for the same thing, sometimes under slightly
different names. Council Districts sits at both b2uf-vm3c and
c8zs-8y7x; Parcels at bhxd-e6up and
rax9-nuvx; Zoning at 2dtu-vge3 and
iknk-w4qw. Pick one family and stay in it. Mixing them produces
joins that look right and are not.
These three refusals are not oversights on the city’s part being reported snidely. They are load-bearing: each one is a thing people routinely assume exists.
gy8t-iqc4
exists, and it has not been touched since 2016. It is a decade-old snapshot.
This site will not present it as current spending, and neither should
anything else. The live budget is a set of PDFs at
berkeleyca.gov. Salaries are worse: the newest
employee-salary file on the portal covers 2014.From the American Community Survey five-year estimates for Berkeley city. Five-year estimates are averages over a window, which is why they are stable enough to publish on a page that is not rebuilt daily — and why they lag a fast-moving rental market.
| Population | 120,257 |
| Housing units | 53,145 |
| Occupied households | 47,135 |
| Owner-occupied | 20,829 · 44.2% |
| Renter-occupied | 26,306 · 55.8% |
| Median gross rent | $2,133 |
| Median value, owner-occupied | $1,413,900 |
| Median household income | $108,092 |
| Renter households paying 35%+ of income on rent | 48.6% |
Two of those numbers deserve a sentence each.
Berkeley is a renter city. Fifty-six per cent of occupied households rent. That is the arithmetic behind an elected rent board, and it is why a policy argument here that sounds like it is about buildings is usually about tenure.
Nearly half of renter households spend 35% or more of their income on rent. Read that number carefully rather than quoting it: Berkeley has a very large student population with low reported income, which pushes the cost-burden share above what a comparable non-university city would show. It is still a real figure about real households, and it is still extraordinary. Both things are true, and a source that gives you the number without the caveat is doing you no favours.
Berkeley is not a Legistar city. There is no meeting API, no eComment, no
official iCal feed. Anyone who tells you otherwise has confused Berkeley with
a city that has one, which is easy to do: *.legistar.com returns
a 200 response for any subdomain you invent, so checking a tenant by
status code proves nothing at all.
What Berkeley actually publishes:
berkeleyca.gov/rss.xml
returns 200 with zero items, and emits template debugging comments before
the XML declaration, so it is not well-formed XML either. It is not a feed;
it is the shape of one.<pubDate> field renders the hour in 12-hour form with no
AM/PM marker, and hard-codes a winter timezone offset all year round. A
standards-compliant parser reads a 6:00 p.m. Council meeting as a
6:00 a.m. one and is wrong by twelve hours, silently, on every single
meeting. The correct field is <gran:pubDateParts>, and the
scheduled start time exists only as text inside the item title. This site
reads the parts element. It is the reason our times are right and it is the
single most useful thing on this page for anyone building something
similar.Forecasts come from the National Weather Service grid point
MTR/91,108. That is not an approximation borrowed from a
neighbouring town: the Berkeley centroid lands exactly inside it, and the
service’s own relative-location field returns Berkeley at a distance of
zero metres. Radar is KMUX.
Berkeley is genuinely covered by AirNow, and unlike some Bay Area cities the reading includes PM2.5 as well as ozone — PM2.5 being the number people actually want during wildfire smoke.
But there is no Berkeley reporting area. Every AirNow reading shown for this city is the Oakland reporting area, run by the Bay Area Air District, whose centroid sits about eight kilometres south. That is close enough to be genuinely informative and far enough that it is not a Berkeley monitor — and on a smoke day, when the difference between the flats and the hills can be larger than the difference between two cities, it matters. This site labels the reading with its reporting area on the page, every time, rather than only in a comment in the source. Presenting a neighbouring area’s reading under this city’s name is how a sister site got it wrong once already.
Candidate filings, certified results and precinct data come from the Alameda County Registrar of Voters, not from the city. See Vote — including a note about the dead link the city’s own pages still publish.
No crime dashboard, no permit tracker, no current budget visualisation. In each case the underlying data either does not exist in machine-readable form or is a decade out of date, and a fabricated version would be worse than none.
If you build something on this portal, check the data timestamp rather than the metadata timestamp, and check it per file. It is the difference between a live map and a museum piece that looks live.