Jeff Baker
@jwbee
Notorious GIS reply guy YIMBY I will come to your hearing, Berkeley politician Vuvuzela owner Father @jeffinatorator on certain bird sites
The space between these buildings in El Cerrito is public space from dawn to dusk. All of this was a parking lot ten years ago.
Gems of Nextdoor. The writer is an 80-year-old poet who comments from unincorporated Contra Costa County. The addressee is a veteran tech professional.
Off-brand tech content: Whoever at the Ubuntu project thought it was smart to index ephemeral compiler outputs was not thinking clearly.
Pre-school goes out of business, turns YIMBY. I could do without the parking garage but aside from that it LGTM.
Happy Wednesday. The last time the Strategic Petroleum Reserve was this empty it was May 1983 and we were filling it up for the first time.
Consistent with what we know about older people stacking the internet atop their existing TV habits
July 1 was tax roll surrender day in California. Time to check on Berkeley's most valuable residential properties. Nothing changed! This means we aren't building quickly enough. "The Standard" remains the most valuable at $124 million. "The Durant" still the most dense, at $3509 per square foot.
The zone of influence passes under it, so bring your licensed engineers. No warranty is implied by these posts.
This side-by-side duplex in North Berkeley is the sleeper SB 79 project opportunity. Because it is less than 200 feet from the entrance of the BART station, it qualifies for 95-foot height limits, or double that with state density bonuses.
Bay Wheels June 2026 update: trips up 43% versus last June. Bonus seasonality analysis: seasonal dip driven entirely by Berkeley; both Emeryville and Oakland set monthly records.
The regular police ticket vehicle also just goes around that block in circles. That officer does sick numbers. That is the only beat that tickets after 5pm, too. There's a local website that tracks it and it's just ridiculous.
Looking at June '26 leases in Berkeley, initial rents were about 1% higher than last year in CPI-adjusted terms, at $2295 for 0- and 1-bed units. Junes highlighted for clarity. 83% of directly comparable turnover was at a lower rent. Only 17% of comps traded higher.
Yesterday seemed to be another Freak Out About Data Centers day here on Blue Sky so I annotated this graph with some some updated hyperscaler energy data.
Maybe wishful thinking, but when Google Maps becomes hyper-detailed, like this section of Berkeley that shows all the lane stripes, medians, bus pads, and every other minor details, I associate that with Waymo preparations.
Area lead-brain victims are having a completely normal response to changes of the zoning map.
YIMBY and Zionism are the same thing in the minds of these losers. This is part of their propaganda.
Nifty geospatial analysis links the graph properties of a place's streets — how many dead ends they have, how many intersections, whether hierarchical or flat — to outcomes like GHG emissions and social isolation. livablecitylab.yale.edu/drawn-apart
Time for the weird arrows. In the leasing season May-June 1st (incl.), 38 Berkeley apts. with comparable leases traded at a higher inflation-adjusted rent, 86 traded lower. Or, local rents increasing less than overall CPI inflation for the most part. $14,600 lease included for amusement purposes.