Downtown & Central Berkeley

Tanja Odzak is a Top East Bay Realtor with eXp Realty, helping buyers and sellers in Berkeley and across the East Bay. Downtown Berkeley is the city's center for the arts, dining, transit, and civic life, gathered around Shattuck Avenue and Center Street, right next to the UC Berkeley campus. Central Berkeley is the flat, tree-lined residential area that spreads out around it, with older homes on a grid of streets, close to BART, the shops on Shattuck, and the Berkeley Bowl. Downtown is mostly apartments and condominiums, with some of the city's newest buildings, while Central Berkeley is where most of the single-family homes are. When we refer to Downtown & Central Berkeley, we are including the Berkeley Central, Central, and Berkeley Bowl areas the MLS lists in that term, along with Downtown.

At a glance: In the 12 months through September 2026, the median sale price of a single-family home in Downtown & Central Berkeley was $1,230,000, across 39 sales. Homes sold for about 132% of their list price, and the middle sale took 14 days on the market.

In the mid-1860s, the private College of California bought land for a new campus, the one that became the University of California. Visiting the site, trustee Frederick Billings admired the view toward the Golden Gate and quoted a poem by the Irish philosopher George Berkeley about the future of learning in the Americas. The trustees adopted the name Berkeley for their new town and campus on May 24, 1866.

Old City Hall at 2134 Martin Luther King Jr. Way was designed by John Bakewell and Arthur Brown Jr., who also designed San Francisco's City Hall, and it served as Berkeley's City Hall from 1909 to 1977. It anchors the Civic Center, where public buildings face a central park. It is on the National Register of Historic Places and was renamed the Maudelle Shirek Building in 2007.

The Central Library at 2090 Kittredge Street, designed by James Plachek in 1930, is a striking example of Art Deco, or zigzag Moderne, with a decorative frieze of figures making books. It replaced an earlier Carnegie library on the same site, and it was renovated, seismically retrofitted, and expanded after voters approved a bond in 1996.

The Shattuck Hotel on Allston Way was built in 1910 by Rosa Shattuck in memory of her husband, Francis Kittredge Shattuck, one of the town's early developers. Its Mediterranean-style corner turrets and arched windows are still a downtown landmark, and for more than seventy years Hink's department store filled its ground floor.

Central Berkeley is a residential neighborhood of flat, tree-lined streets, where the older homes include Craftsman bungalows and cottages, Victorian-style houses, and two-unit buildings. Downtown's shops, restaurants, and BART are close by.

The Berkeley Bowl is a neighborhood landmark. Glenn and Diane Yasuda opened it in 1977 as a small neighborhood market in a former bowling alley at 2777 Shattuck Avenue, which gave it its name. It outgrew the building and moved to a former supermarket at 2020 Oregon Street in 1999, and Berkeley Bowl West opened in 2009. The Berkeley Farmers' Market sets up at Center Street and Martin Luther King Jr. Way every Saturday from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m.

Berkeley High School, the city's public high school, is downtown on Allston Way, and Berkeley City College is on Center Street. Washington Elementary School is on Martin Luther King Jr. Way, and Berkwood Hedge School, a private school for kindergarten through grade 8, is on Bancroft Way. The UC Berkeley campus begins at Oxford Street. All of Berkeley's public schools are part of the Berkeley Unified School District. School assignment doesn't follow neighborhood names, so check with the district for any address you're considering. The Berkeley page lists the public and private schools across the city.

Buyers who look at Downtown and Central Berkeley usually want a home close to BART, the university, theaters, and restaurants, whether that is a condominium in a building where the center of the city is right outside the door, or an older house on a flat Central Berkeley street.

Tanja Odzak knows how a Berkeley sale works, from the city's own rules to the paperwork that comes with a condominium and the checks an older house needs. If you're weighing a move to Downtown or Central Berkeley, that's worth a conversation.