Very cool. Happy to read this.
We live in SF, and our business is downtown. It has been and continues to be a ghost town. It’s hard to point fingers, because tech dominates the industry here, and it’s so easy to work remotely. But the result of that is the death of small business and of the city itself. There is no positive spin on it. Nobody is winning.
Visiting Berkeley is such a positive experience - when you step onto Shattuck from the Downtown Bk BART station, it’s very invigorating.
Yes, I’ve heard FiDi occupancy is in the 30% range. Very sad to see it - used to live in the Hayes eons ago and loved going to FiDi and embarcadero in the good ol days. That place would be hopping during the week but now almost every commercial building is unoccupied.
Glad to see Berkeley grow. The city and Cal feed off of each other - warts and all, its an exhilirating atmosphere.
You’re right.
Hayes is doing pretty well, because there is pretty well established primary residential there. Downtown house so many condos that serve as 2nd homes to people, and they aren’t here either. The Embarcadero is so incredible. I don’t know of a better urban walk on the West Coast. And it’s crickets these days (except around the Ferry Building, lunch time and Farmer’s mkt)
I agree with you about SF (we go to the city quite frequently so have watched the changes close up and in real time). As for Berkeley, yes, good news overall - and I was surprised our little hamlet of Albany is growing, too. I agree with you about Shattuck, but I think the distribution is pretty unequal (which is usually the case). As an Albanian, our direct line to downtown Berkeley is Solano Avenue and there are still so many shuttered up shops there, unfortunately. I do hope Solano will bounce back along with this growth. It’s such a great area, shared by Berkeley and Albany, but I think the rents may be prohibitively high for many small businesses (which is the really the only kind we have there).
Saw this on Reddit today. Pretty dismal!
<<<<off to peek at zillow and see what DS’s house in Berkeley is worth. >>>> Hope it’s come back up to what they paid for it!!!
Amazing how different Redfin and zillow estimates are!! But I am glad the market there is improving!
Before the pandemic weren’t Berkeley residents complaining about all the students living off campus? I believe they tried to force the university to shrink enrolment.
I think it’s less about the current students living off campus, and more about the need to build additional student housing. There’s a lot of NIMBYism here, unfortunately, in terms of new housing projects (and not just for students, but in general) and then there’s the People’s Park controversy. The university lacks housing for students, and the city lacks affordable housing (for students and others).
Berkeley residents have all sorts of viewpoints. Did you look at the other recent article posted here? Berkeley housing article, paradise and parking lots - NYT
Existing housing owners have financial incentives to go NIMBY against new housing development, since the increased supply of housing will compete for the housing they own in either the sale or rental markets. Basically NIMBY against building more housing is erecting a barrier to entry against additional competition. This is not unique to any particular city.