Alameda County

What changed: this release adds a Jobs, Homelessness & Evictions section covering the labor market (2000–2021, with the latest EDD estimate), point-in-time counts of unhoused residents through the preliminary January 2026 count, and annual eviction filings from Superior Court records through June 2026. A Compare Trends section lets any two countywide series be charted together on independent axes. Three Beyond the Indicators models are now embedded: the homeowner share of adults (HPOP, Minneapolis Fed measure with modeled local estimates) inside Housing Stock & Tenure, an interactive RHNA revenue model inside Housing Cost & Cost Burden that estimates the property tax value of hitting the housing goal, and a structural homelessness simulator (after Colburn & Aldern 2022) inside Jobs, Homelessness & Evictions. Partial-year eviction counts are now extrapolated to full-year projections, clearly marked. This release also adds interactivity throughout: hover any percentage for the underlying count; bar and stacked charts gained a Compare with control that marks a second geography with tick marks or paired rows; the point-in-time and DOF structure charts toggle between lines, stacked bars, and stacked area views; county and subregion trend charts for population and housing units can be decomposed into stacked bar or stacked area contributions by place; the income, education, structure, and vacancy composition charts are now longitudinal; and the demographics section gained senior and child household trends and an average household size chart. HUD Fair Market Rents for the Oakland-Fremont region (FY2020\u2013FY2026, all bedroom sizes) are now included in the cost section and the Compare tool. An August 2026 data refresh landed across the board: published margins of error now appear in hover tooltips (ACS 2020-2024 for the county and all 14 cities; CHAS 2018-2022 for cost burden and AMI bands, decoded with HUD\u2019s official dictionary); unemployment annual averages extend through 2025 with a June 2026 monthly point; the industry chart gained a 2025 QCEW levels view; the 2024 point-in-time shelter split is loaded and 2023-2024 figures are HUD-verified; and the RHNA panel is now geography-aware, showing each jurisdiction\u2019s own 6th-cycle progress and verified 5th-cycle finals from HCD\u2019s July 2026 dataset. The visual presentation was also upgraded with a new hero treatment, dark section banners, and a restyled key-findings card. A ZIP-level choropleth of FY2026 Small Area Fair Market Rents (all bedroom sizes) was added to the cost section, the geography bar now stays pinned while scrolling, the CPI reference is updated to June 2026, and the Colburn simulator notes the latest observed metro rent and vacancy from ACS 2024 1-year data. This release also adds a jurisdiction banner header that updates with the geography selection (seal, landscape photo, and title per jurisdiction, with graceful fallbacks while image links are being pinned) and a Report Builder tab that assembles any set of visualizations into a printable PDF briefing for the selected jurisdiction, with PDF checkboxes on every chart and the custom trend comparison exportable as configured. County-provided city seals and photos are now embedded directly in the file (including the Oakland aerial), median household income shows its margin of error, and all three maps gained a census-tract mode covering 379 tracts with high-uncertainty flagging. Public beta: not every data point has been individually confirmed; treat this tool as a reference and consult the original sources, linked throughout and in the data dictionary, before relying on any figure. The construction cost placeholders are now live charts (RAND composition, BLS input-cost index), a fresher ACS 2020-2024 cost-burden chart joins the CHAS figures, education counts cover every city, and the cost map\u2019s tract mode gained renter cost burden decoded from the CHAS tract file.

What it shows: the preliminary 2026 count recorded 8,201 unhoused residents, down 13% from 2024 and the largest two-year decline in the count's history, with unsheltered residents falling 18%. Eviction filings, held near zero by the 2020–2023 moratoria, surged past their pre-pandemic level in 2023–2024 and have begun to ease. Nearly half of the County's renter households spend more than 30% of income on housing, and real rent has grown almost three times as fast as real income since 2000.

How to read it: the 2026 point-in-time figures are preliminary; detailed results come later this year. 2026 eviction filings cover January through June only. BLS annual series end at 2021 and the gap to the latest monthly estimate is shown as a gap, not a line. Actual published figures and modeled estimates are visually separated throughout; anything projected carries an amber badge.

Cite it like this: Alameda County Housing and Community Development, Alameda County Housing Needs Dashboard, August 2026 release. Data: U.S. Census Bureau ACS; HUD CHAS and PIT; CA Dept. of Finance E-5; BLS/EDD; Zillow; Alameda County Superior Court records. Copy citation

Demographics, households, income, education, poverty, tenure, housing stock: U.S. Census Bureau (2000 Decennial Census) and American Community Survey 5-Year Estimates for 2017–2021, 2019–2023, and 2020–2024 (released Jan 29, 2026). current Charts are labeled by the survey's final year. ACS 5-year vintages overlap, so adjacent estimates are not statistically independent; compare non-overlapping periods (2021 vs. 2024) for trend statements.

Constant dollars: all income and rent figures are expressed in 2024 dollars, converted using CPI-U annual averages (2000 = 172.2, 2010 = 218.1, 2021 = 271.0, 2023 = 304.7, 2024 = 313.7). Zillow home values and rents are shown in nominal dollars, as Zillow publishes them.

Derived geographies: Bay Area Region, the four Measure A1 subregions, and Unincorporated Balance are built by summing component geographies (Unincorporated Balance is the County minus all incorporated cities and CDPs). Counts and shares are computed from those sums. Medians and the Gini index cannot be summed, so they are left blank for these geographies in the 2023 and 2024 vintages.

Cost burden & AMI bands: HUD Comprehensive Housing Affordability Strategy (CHAS), Table 8, covering 2000, 2015–2019, and 2018–2022 (released December 2025). current Census rounds all CHAS estimates (1–7 rounds to 4; 8+ rounds to the nearest 5), so the Bay Area Region, the Measure A1 subregions, and Unincorporated Balance are sums of smaller geographies and carry more rounding error than the published County and place figures.

Market rents & home values: Zillow ZHVI (typical home value) and ZORI (observed rent), monthly through June 2026, shown as annual averages in nominal dollars. CoStar has been removed from this dashboard.

Projected geographies: Zillow publishes at the city level only. Values shown for Alameda County, the four Measure A1 subregions, and Unincorporated Balance are weighted averages of their component cities, weighted by owner-occupied units for home values and renter-occupied units for rents. These are labeled "projected" wherever they appear and are estimates rather than published figures.

Housing unit counts: California Department of Finance E-5, January 2020 through January 2026 (released May 2026). DOF publishes annually for incorporated cities and counties, so CDPs, the Measure A1 subregions, and Unincorporated Balance have no DOF series and fall back to ACS. DOF and ACS count housing units on different bases and will not match exactly; DOF is the official state figure used for housing program administration.

Affordable housing supply: rent-restricted unit counts are as of 2023, confirmed August 2026 as Figure 41 of Alameda County HCD\u2019s Housing for All report (December 2023), which reconciles CTCAC, HCD, California Housing Partnership, and County inventories into a single deduplicated jurisdiction table summing to 30,731 countywide. No source publishes a more recent jurisdiction-level count as of August 2026; Piedmont\u2019s zero is a reported figure, not a gap.

Jobs and unemployment: BLS Local Area Unemployment Statistics annual averages, 2000–2021 compiled by CA EDD and 2022–2025 retrieved August 2026 from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis FRED mirror of the same official BLS series (Bay Area figures aggregate the nine counties from county-level labor force and employment). The most recent point is the June 2026 BLS monthly estimate, not seasonally adjusted. Industry employment offers two bases: the 2000–2021 change series (EDD sectors) and 2025 levels from the BLS Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages by supersector; the two are not cell-for-cell comparable and the chart notes the differences.

Point-in-time counts: HUD Continuum of Care counts for CA-502 (Oakland, Berkeley/Alameda County), 2007–2022, plus Alameda County Housing & Homelessness Services results for the January 2024 count and the preliminary January 2026 count. current Counts occur every two years on a single January night; intervening years repeat the prior count and are omitted here. The 2021 unsheltered count was canceled during COVID. Counts are conservative by design and the 2026 figures are preliminary pending the full report later in 2026. Race shares for unhoused residents come from the HUD 2022 file; HUD race categories include people of Hispanic ethnicity, while the ACS comparison shares break Hispanic or Latino out separately. 2023 and 2024 CA-502 figures were verified in August 2026 against HUD\u2019s per-CoC population reports; the 2024 transitional housing figure follows HUD (836) rather than the county infographic (825) because the HUD figure reconciles exactly with the sheltered total. The 2026 sheltered figure is derived (total minus unsheltered) pending the county\u2019s detailed 2026 report.

Eviction filings: unlawful detainer cases filed in Alameda County Superior Court, January 2000 through June 2026, counted by filing date and assigned to jurisdictions from case address records. A filing opens a case and does not mean an eviction occurred. Unincorporated communities may be misattributed to neighboring cities due to inconsistent addressing, and all unincorporated territory is grouped as one jurisdiction. Filings were held near zero by pandemic-era moratoria (the County moratorium ran March 2020 to April 2023) and surged when the moratoria ended, so multi-year comparisons across 2020–2023 reflect policy, not underlying displacement pressure alone. Recorded 2026 filings cover January–June; where a full-year 2026 figure appears it is a projection, computed by dividing January–June filings by the average January–June share of annual filings in 2024 and 2025 (about 51%). 2023 is excluded from that seasonal basis because its first half was still suppressed by the moratorium. Projections are marked as such wherever they appear.

Structural model of homelessness: the Beyond the Indicators simulator recreates the Colburn & Aldern (2022) regression framework with 2024 HUD AHAR PIT counts and ACS rent estimates, independently rebuilt by HCD staff for education and orientation. Coefficients and intervals are preliminary, the interval shown is for the conditional mean rather than a single region, and outputs should not be cited or used for policy decisions or external reporting.

Compare Trends tab: all series are countywide. Dual axes are scaled independently and may be truncated, which can make unrelated series appear aligned; co-movement between two series is not evidence that one causes the other.

Homeowner share of adults (HPOP): the Homeowners-to-Population ratio, developed by the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, is the share of adults 18+ who are themselves homeowners. United States and California values are published estimates from ACS microdata through 2024. City and county values are modeled planning estimates: each jurisdiction's ACS owner-occupancy anchors a log-odds offset carried through the published California history. Modeled values carry a dagger (†) and should not be cited as published HPOP. The Bay Area Region series is an adult-population-weighted average of the nine modeled county series.

RHNA revenue model: an independent planning model, not a County revenue forecast and not a budget document. Targets are ABAG 6th-cycle allocations times each jurisdiction's Moderate + Above Moderate share; last-cycle production is approximate market-rate units permitted 2015–2023 from HCD Annual Progress Reports; per-parcel revenue derives from AEI Housing Center parcel data with Prop 13 reassessment effects; AB 8 splits are county-level averages and vary by Tax Rate Area. All dollars are nominal, and revenue phases in at half weight during the 8-year production period. Treat outputs as order-of-magnitude planning estimates. Sixth-cycle progress and verified fifth-cycle finals by jurisdiction were loaded August 2026 from HCD\u2019s RHNA Progress Report dataset (updated July 31, 2026); figures are jurisdiction self-reported Annual Progress Report rollups that HCD does not independently verify.

Counts and margins of error: hover figures shown as "≈ N ± M" are published estimates with their published 90% margins of error, loaded August 2026 from ACS 2020-2024 5-year tables (California, Alameda County, and all 14 cities) and, for cost burden and AMI bands, from the HUD CHAS 2018-2022 files with cell definitions decoded via HUD\u2019s official data dictionary; aggregated categories combine MOEs as the square root of summed squares (a standard approximation). Where no ± is shown, the count is derived (percentage times denominator) and no published MOE is loaded: this applies to CDPs, subregions, and the unincorporated balance (not covered by the retrieved place-level files), to non-latest survey years, and to a few remaining gaps after the August 5 API-key pull closed most of the prior list; still open are city-level ACS cost burden (B25106, though CHAS already supplies cost-burden MOEs throughout) and education categories below some-college. Median household income and senior-household MOEs now cover the county and all 14 cities, and education counts for some-college through graduate degrees cover the county and California. Treat derived counts for small geographies as approximate. Margins of error are not shown in on-screen tooltips; every loaded estimate-and-margin pair is included as moe_ columns in the CSV export for analysts who need them.

HUD Fair Market Rents: FMRs are the 40th percentile of gross rents for standard-quality units, set annually for the Oakland-Fremont, CA HUD Metro FMR Area, which combines Alameda and Contra Costa counties; HUD does not publish county-level FMRs for this region, so the series is regional and constant across the geography selector. Fiscal years run October through September (FY2026 took effect October 1, 2025). FY2026 values come from HUD\u2019s published FY2026 FMR schedule; FY2020\u2013FY2025 values are HUD history retrieved August 2026, with year-over-year changes cross-checked across vintages. Gross rent includes utilities, so FMRs are not directly comparable to asking-rent series like ZORI. FY2026 revised Small Area FMRs (effective May 21, 2026) were loaded August 2026 from HUD\u2019s published workbook, covering all 115 ZIPs in the two-county HMFA; the dashboard maps the 48 whose ZCTA center falls inside Alameda County against 2010-vintage ZIP boundary approximations. Twenty HMFA ZIPs are PO-box-only and have no mappable boundary.

Construction costs: the composition chart uses RAND\u2019s 2025 study of completed California multifamily projects (2019 dollars per net rentable square foot); the input-cost line is the BLS producer price index for multifamily construction goods (series WPUIP231120, January 2020 through May 2026), transcribed from FRED\u2019s republication and worth spot-checking against BLS before any external use. TCAC per-unit benchmarks in the footnote mix scopes across years (Bay Area subregions in 2011, the regional average in 2019, statewide LIHTC in 2023, and a single 2025 project) because no continuous regional series is published; they show the trajectory, not a consistent time series. ADU figures are the Terner Center 2021 statewide owner survey.

ACS cost burden (B25106): loaded August 2026 at place, county, and state level. The 2024 five-year release uses a 46-line tenure by income by burden structure rather than the older 15-line layout; the structure was verified empirically (every group sums to its header and both tenure totals reconcile exactly) before any figure was displayed. Burden shares exclude zero-income and no-cash-rent households from the base. Education table B15003 was re-pulled fresh at all levels in the same pass, so education counts and margins now cover every city.

Tract cost burden: renter cost-burden shares by tract are decoded from the HUD CHAS 2018-2022 tract file using the official data dictionary; the same decode reproduces the countywide renter burden figure exactly. About half of tracts carry the high-uncertainty flag on this variable.

August 2026 restructure: the dashboard was reorganized into three data tabs: Population, Demographics and Jobs; Housing Stock, Costs and RHNA (absorbing the former cost tab, with a Housing Element and RHNA explainer); and Homelessness and Evictions (absorbing vacancy). Measure A1 subregions were removed from the geography selector; the underlying subregion aggregates remain in the data file and the CSV export.

Census tract layer: the three maps offer a Show census tracts mode with ACS 2020-2024 tract estimates (population, median household income, household poverty rate, tenure, occupied households, and median gross rent) for all 379 Alameda County tracts, on TIGER 2024 boundaries simplified for display. Tract estimates are far less precise than city or county figures: dotted outlines flag tracts where the margin of error exceeds 40% of the estimate, top-coded medians (at or above the Census ceiling of $250,001 income or $3,501 rent) are labeled, and Census sentinel values for unpopulated tracts display as no data. Tract-level household poverty is flagged in most tracts and should be read only for broad patterns. CHAS tract data (2018-2022) is staged for future cost-burden tract mapping.

Banner images: jurisdiction seals and landscape photos are hot-linked from Wikimedia Commons (government seals are public records under California law; photos are public domain or openly licensed, with the credit shown on the banner). Image links are candidate-based and fall back to the plain banner when a file is unavailable; exact files and credits are being pinned. Images require an internet connection and are not embedded in this file.

Boundary changes: the Sunol CDP shrank between 2000 and 2021 through annexation to Pleasanton and reversion to unincorporated county, so long-run comparisons for Sunol are unreliable. Unincorporated Balance shows a steep apparent decline (about 11,100 residents in 2000 to about 4,400 in 2024) largely because CDP boundaries expanded over the period and absorbed territory that was previously counted in the balance. Treat that series as a residual category rather than a stable geography.

Geographies follow the Measure A1 subregion definitions (North / Mid / South / East County).