Why Everything New On College Avenue Used To Be Something Else
Walk College Avenue through the Elmwood this month and you will notice the corridor is busier than it has been in years. A new ice cream shop is coming. A sandwich spot is on its way. A longtime brunch counter is packing up for something bigger just blocks away. A pizza line that vanished for weeks is back stretching around the corner. On paper, this reads like a growth spurt.
It isn't one. Not a single one of these moves adds a square foot of new retail space to the neighborhood. Every business on this list is sliding into an address that already had four walls and a roof, most of them built by other businesses that came before. The Elmwood isn't expanding. It's reshuffling inside a footprint that has stayed roughly the same size since before most of the people ordering coffee there today were born.
That's not an accident of the market. It's the direct, traceable result of a height limit the city has spent the better part of this year fighting to change, and mostly failing to. If you want to understand why your favorite bakery took eight years to add one room, or why a sandwich shop can only find space by waiting for someone else to leave, the zoning map explains almost all of it.
Start with the corridor's most patient business. The Cheese Board Collective has operated its bakery and cheese shop out of 1504 Shattuck Avenue since 1975, with a pizzeria next door at 1512 that runs on a one-pizza-a-day menu and a line that regularly wraps the block. In 2018, when the neighboring Berkeley Produce Center closed at 1500 Shattuck, the worker-owned collective bought the space with plans to finally grow.
What followed was not a straightforward buildout. The 1500 Shattuck building hadn't been touched since 1973 and needed a new subfloor before anything else could happen, including dropping the floor by 18 inches to align the two spaces. Structural work started in 2019. Then the pandemic shut the project down entirely in March 2020. Construction eventually resumed, and the collective ran retail out of a shipping container parked on Shattuck starting in January 2026 while the merged space came together behind it. The expanded bakery and cheese shop finally opened on April 10, 2026, nearly eight years after the collective first acquired the second address.
Here's what didn't happen anywhere in that timeline: nobody added a floor. The Cheese Board didn't build up. It waited eight years to knock down a wall between two ground-level storefronts it already owned, because that was the only kind of growth the zoning would allow.
The pizzeria at 1512 Shattuck, meanwhile, never closed for the construction next door and kept its regular hours and live music the entire time, save for its usual scheduled summer break. It reopened Tuesday, August 11, and is back on its normal schedule now.
While the Cheese Board finishes its long-delayed expansion, the rest of the corridor is turning over fast:
Every one of those addresses already existed as a business before the new tenant showed up. Salt & Straw isn't building a scoop shop from the ground up. Elmwood Subs isn't carving a new storefront out of empty land. Eggy's isn't disappearing, it's making room, and Epicurious Garden's food court model depends entirely on that kind of internal rotation, the same way it has cycled through Source Mini and Flavor Mediterranean Food in stalls before this one.
Nudi Blue's short pause is worth sitting with for a second, because it says something about what it costs to hold a spot on this kind of corridor. The restaurant opened in April with a genuinely unusual pitch: Chiang Mai teas by day, a raw seafood bar by night, built around a former coffee shop space that had no kitchen hood to begin with. Four months later, the team is stepping back to rework the concept rather than close outright and look for a different building.
That's the rational move when the alternative is competing for one of a handful of open storefronts on a street where a bakery needed eight years to gain one room. A pause protects the lease. It keeps the 2049 San Pablo address in hand while the format gets fixed, instead of surrendering a hard-won spot in a market where the next tenant might be waiting behind you.
The reason none of this involves new construction traces directly to a fight that played out at Berkeley's Planning Commission this year. In March 2026, commissioners endorsed a scaled-back version of a proposal to raise height limits on College, Solano, and North Shattuck avenues, after merchants and residents pushed back hard on an earlier plan that would have applied to entire blocks.
What survived is much narrower. Instead of rezoning the whole corridor, the city is targeting a handful of specific parcels, among them the strip mall anchored by a 7-Eleven at College and Russell Street in the Elmwood, a vacant former bank branch next to the Cheese Board Pizzeria on North Shattuck, and a gas station at Solano and Colusa. Most commissioners floated a four-story limit for the targeted College Avenue sites. Everywhere else on the street, the height limit stays exactly where it has been: two stories.
That distinction matters more than it sounds like it should. It means the building that houses Salt & Straw's future scoop shop, the one that will hold Elmwood Subs, and the one Eggy's is vacating are all capped at the same two stories they've always been capped at. If a business wants more room in the Elmwood, its only path is the one the Cheese Board took: buy the building next door, gut it, and merge the footprints, a process measured in years, not months.
Preservationists tried a second route to lock that ceiling in place even further. In June 2026, Berkeley's Landmarks Preservation Commission narrowly voted down a proposal to declare the Elmwood's commercial strip, most of it built between 1907 and 1928, a formal historic district. Supporters argued the designation would protect the neighborhood's character. Critics pointed out that it would have added a discretionary review process to any project in the district, one that could stretch up to a year and a half. The commission rejected the designation, but the underlying tension between preserving what's there and making room for anything bigger hasn't gone anywhere.
The pattern isn't unique to College Avenue. Elsewhere in the city this summer, Café Bolita took over the brick building that used to house Standard Fare and has already built a steady lunchtime following. On Telegraph Avenue, Sana'a Cafe moved into a former Peet's Coffee at the corner of Telegraph and Dwight. In West Berkeley, Milk Cloud Bakery slid into the old La Noisette space on Eighth Street. Different corridors, same mechanism: the buildings stay put, and the businesses rotate through them.
If you live near College Avenue, that's the actual story behind the string of openings you've been noticing. Not a neighborhood on the rise so much as a neighborhood that has figured out, block by block, how to keep changing inside a shape it isn't allowed to outgrow.
Mark Choi keeps close tabs on how these small shifts in Berkeley's commercial corridors connect to the housing stock around them, from Elmwood bungalows a few blocks off College to the properties near North Shattuck's Gourmet Ghetto. If you're curious what any of this means for a specific address you already own, or one you've had your eye on, Mark Choi is always glad to talk it through.
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My objective is to get the top dollar for your home in the current dynamic real estate market and to make the process of listing or buying your home as stress-free and fun as possible.
MARK P. CHOI | CA DRE# 01433100
1619 Shattuck Avenue Berkeley, CA 94709