Are you planning a move to Berkeley, but wouldn't know the Gourmet Ghetto from Fourth Street from a hole in the ground? This is a little page of crib notes on UCB and its surroundings. This is based on my experiences & those of a few friends, so of course YMMV.

Back in April 2003 I was holed up in a laboratory, getting ready to take off to grad school and desperately combing craigslist.org for housing. I didn't know jack about Berkeley. I wished there was some way to know where the heck the good neighborhoods were, and which areas were less than safe (especially for a single gal new to the area). This is the kind of info I sure could've used back then; I hope it's a help for somebody else.

Places to live
Below is a fairly self-explanatory (and fairly scribbly) map of Berkeley proper.

Red areas are those I suggest avoiding if at all possible: they're along or adjacent to noisy, busy, often crime-ridden streets with a lot of bus/truck traffic, car break-ins, panhandlers, etc. You'll often find pleasant homes a few blocks away from these areas, but try not to park yourself within the red zones unless you're seriously confident in self-defense.

Yellow areas are probably where most of the graduate students here live-- while I've met a few folks who've bought small homes in these neighborhoods, most students will gang up and rent a shared home. You'll probably have a generous amount of student neighbors and families around. There are plenty of grocery stores, restaurants, and shops as well--sometimes more conveniently accessible from yellow areas than the posher green ones. Rent should be around $500-$700/month for a room, $800-$1100 for a studio or 1-bedroom.

The green areas (not to be confused with the Green Zone) tend to be safe, reasonably peaceful, and populated with a mix of retirees, wealthy families, and starving grad students. It's incredibly expensive to own a home here, so there are tons of beautiful old houses whose primary occupants rent out anything from a room to a whole floor or two. Many of the medium- to-large houses are divided in two and occupied by two (fairly affluent) families. If you're particularly tenacious about your house-hunt, you can find a clean, spacious, affordable rental in these areas. Rooms should rent for $600-$800/month, depending on size and number of tenants; studio apartments go for $850-$1200.

While these are pretty safe neighborhoods to live in, you'll have to leave them to actually go to school. The northside's a bit safer, but no matter where you live it's always a bit of a gamble to walk home alone at night. Berkeley provides a selection of night shuttle buses, etc, and if you're a student you can get a free ACTransit bus pass. There are fairly reliable & frequent buses running up and down College, University, Oxford, Hearst, Shattuck, and Cedar. A godsend if you're always running late not that I would know anything about that

Neighborhoods on craigslist:
"Berkeley hills," "Oakland hills" = Safe, posh, probably expensive
"North Berkeley," "Gilman," "Near Fourth Street shops" = Really, really far from campus. Ride the bus or bike your ass off.
"Berkeley" = probably west or south of the main campus. Contains a few nicer areas.
"Southside" = South of campus; invariably cheaper, can be nice or scary. If you can, stay at least a couple blocks away from Telegraph Ave or University Ave. There's great restaurants and shopping on these streets, but they're also kinda scungy at night. And for gosh sakes, steer clear of People's Park after sundown.


Groceries, clothes, etc: Shoppin' areas
One of the nicest things about Berkeley is that you can walk just about anywhere. Unless we're buying furniture or a few crates of soda, grocery runs are a walkable enterprise. The Elmwood (along College Ave), Solano Ave, most of University Ave, the Gourmet Ghetto (north Shattuck), Telegraph,, and Fourth Street all contain multitudes of restaurants, clothing stores (used clothes on Telegraph and central-south Shattuck; expensive clothes on Solano and north Shattuck), groceries, various vendors/farmers' markets, video rentals, and laundromats.
There's a Whole Foods on Ashby and a Trader Joe's in Emeryville (where Ikea and all the other "big-box" stores live), but: if you are a human being who enjoys eating food, you need to visit Berkeley Bowl at least once. It's not hard to get to by bus, and a leisurely 20-minute walk south of campus. This place is packed with local produce (which is an enormous amount of stuff, being as this is California) and every weird, exotic fruit, veggie, or food product you could possibly wish for. The produce is very, very inexpensive and much of it is organic; there's also a great deli area, a heart-stopping cheese selection, and lots of meat & seafood. Your number one stop for durian, caltrops, starfruit, rainbow chard, etc etc.
As you may have deduced, you're never too far from a reasonably lively shopping street. If you like walking, you'll do just fine here (and save a bundle on gym membership). One thing that's not so great: BART, the Bay Area Rapid Transit System. Rapid it may be, but there are no BART stops in or near most of the residential neighborhoods. Downtown Berkeley BART is right next to campus, but living in the Berkeley hills or the Elmwood district will have you a tidy 20-30 minutes' walk from the nearest BART stop. Of BART-station-containing neighborhoods, Rockridge area(on College, south of Alcatraz) is probably the nicest. (even if you live in Rockridge, you'll probably find it quicker to take the bus north on College Ave than to Bart to school.)