History
The university, the fire, the tenants, and the ballot.
Week of October 5–11, 2026 · Updated Friday, October 9, 2026 · Source: Berkeley's agenda listing (live)
Why a city of a hundred-odd thousand people argues about everything, and why so many of those arguments turn out to be about the same two things: the university, and who gets to live here.
The order of events matters more here than almost anywhere else. The site was chosen and named by a college in 1866. The university was created in 1868 and opened here in 1873. The town incorporated in 1878 — a decade after the institution that defined it.
Berkeley is therefore not a city that acquired a university. It is a town that grew around one, on land the university had already picked. The university pays no property tax, is not subject to city zoning, and houses a population the city must plan for and cannot control. Nearly every housing argument in Berkeley has that fact somewhere underneath it, and the enrollment litigation that reached the state legislature is only its most recent form.
The land is Ohlone territory — specifically Huchiun, the East Bay territory of the Chochenyo-speaking peoples, who were here for thousands of years before any of the rest of this. The shellmound near what is now Fourth Street is roughly five thousand years old and is among the oldest known settlement sites on the bay.
Under Mexican rule the whole East Bay shoreline was a single enormous rancho, granted to Luis María Peralta in 1820 and divided among his sons in 1842; the northern share, which is all of modern Berkeley, went to José Domingo Peralta.
Neither of those facts is decoration. They are why land acknowledgements are read at the top of Council meetings, why the shellmound kept returning to the agenda for years, and why its purchase and return to Indigenous stewardship in 2024 counts as a civic event and not just a property transaction.
The 1906 earthquake across the bay did more to build Berkeley than any plan did: refugees arrived in numbers that turned a college town into a city inside a few years. The Campanile went up in 1914.
Then in 1923 a dry north wind drove fire out of Wildcat Canyon and through the neighbourhoods above campus, destroying roughly 640 structures, 584 of them houses, in an afternoon. The shingled hill houses people photograph today are largely what was built afterwards, and the city’s permanent preoccupation with wildfire in the hills starts there — it is still visible in the fact that the current middle-housing rules stop at the high fire hazard line.
The same year, and much less remembered, Berkeley adopted the council-manager form of government. That is the decision that put a professional City Manager in charge of every department, and it is why a councilmember cannot order a pothole filled. See Guide.
Wartime shipyard and defence work in the 1940s brought a large Black migration to the East Bay. It reshaped West and South Berkeley, built a community whose institutions still anchor those neighbourhoods, and set up the displacement question that the Adeline Corridor plan is still arguing about.
The Free Speech Movement of 1964 began as a dispute about whether political tables could be set up on a strip of pavement at the edge of campus, and became the template for student protest in the United States. People’s Park followed in 1969 and stayed a live item in city and university politics for more than half a century, until the state Supreme Court settled it.
In 1968, between those two, Berkeley desegregated its schools by two-way busing with no court order compelling it — the first US city of its size to do so voluntarily. It is the part of the decade that gets mentioned least and changed the most.
And in 1972, a few blocks from the plaza, disabled students who had been housed in a hospital ward founded the Center for Independent Living. It was the first in the country, it ran the first curb-cut programme anywhere, and the modern disability rights movement traces to it. Berkeley’s best-known export of that decade is the protest; its most widely copied one is the kerb ramp.
Berkeley’s rent stabilization ordinance dates from 1980, and the decisive design choice was to put an elected rent board in charge of it rather than an appointed one. That is why rent policy in this city is not a Council matter, why tenants and landlords campaign for a body most residents of other cities have never heard of, and why an item about your rent will not appear on a Council agenda.
Council elections moved from citywide to district seats in 1986. It is the reason this site has eight district pages, and it changed who can get an item onto an agenda: a neighbourhood no longer has to persuade a majority elected by the whole city, only the one member elected by it.
Berkeley also spent those decades using the municipal ballot as a policy instrument rather than just a personnel decision. It divested from apartheid South Africa in 1979, the first US city to do so. It banned Styrofoam food containers in 1988. It replaced Columbus Day with Indigenous Peoples Day in 1992, again first. It started curbside recycling in 1973, through a non-profit that still runs it.
Voters approved ranked-choice voting in 2004, and the city first used it at the polls in 2010. The six-year gap was not foot-dragging: the Charter allows the Council to adopt instant-runoff voting only if the county’s equipment can actually count it, the election can still be consolidated with the county’s, and it costs the city nothing extra. All three conditions had to become true first. It now governs Mayor, Council and Auditor — see Vote.
In 2014 Berkeley became the first city in the United States to pass a tax on sugar-sweetened drinks: a penny an ounce, levied on distributors, and fought at a scale of spending a municipal measure rarely attracts.
The current chapter is the oldest one in new clothes: how much housing gets built, where, and who decides. Three pressures meet on the same agenda most months. State housing law has moved a substantial share of land-use authority out of city hands. The university continues to grow, and the enrollment litigation of 2022 showed how quickly that becomes a statewide question. And fire risk in the hills constrains where anything can go.
The 2025 middle-housing ordinance is the clearest single marker of where that has landed. Two- to six-unit buildings are now ministerial across most of the city’s residential zones — approved in thirty days against a checklist, and not appealable to the Zoning Adjustments Board or the Council. A city famous for the length of its public hearings has removed the hearing from an entire category of housing. Whatever you think of that, it is the biggest change to how Berkeley decides things since districts arrived in 1986.
This is the one page on this site that is not rebuilt from a feed. It is written history, it uses years rather than dates on purpose, and it is the page to be most sceptical of us on.
Watch it rather than read it, if you would rather: several of these events have contemporary footage, and it is collected on Watch.