Parcel Maps in Berkeley, CA

Berkeley is one of the most exacting jurisdictions in the East Bay for land division, and that shapes how we approach every project here. The City routinely requires surveyor-stamped site plans, and in the Hillside Overlay district the review adds slope, access, and fire-safety considerations on top of base zoning. Our first step is always feasibility: does the parcel meet the district's minimum lot size and frontage twice over, and can each resulting lot actually take a driveway and a building footprint? In the Berkeley Hills — where lots hang off switchback streets, share driveways, and lean on decades-old retaining walls — the answer often turns on a few feet of grade or a recorded access easement, not on gross square footage. The Hayward fault also crosses the city, and Alquist-Priolo zone parcels carry structural setbacks from the fault trace that can eliminate a proposed building site.

Under the Subdivision Map Act, a division into four or fewer parcels proceeds by parcel map: tentative map to the City, conditions of approval, then a final parcel map examined and recorded with the Alameda County Recorder. Berkeley's flatland blocks raise a different question — narrow lots where SB 9 urban lot splits are generating real interest, but where fraction-of-a-foot setback questions decide whether a split pencils. On brown-shingle and early-1900s housing stock, walls are seldom square and fences seldom sit on the deed line, so we resolve the boundary rigorously under recorded evidence before dividing anything.

Our Trimble terrestrial laser scanner lets us capture the topographic base Berkeley expects with a tentative map — grades, walls, trees, structures — in the same mobilization as the boundary fieldwork. One visit, one survey-grade point cloud, and the tentative map exhibit, setback dimensions, and topographic survey all come from the same dataset.