[8][9] Kensington’s community is mostly highly educated and affluent, and it contains only single family residential houses.

It is among the safest and cleanest places in the United States, with one of the nation’s top public elementary schools.

Many distinguished University of California, Berkeley professors, Nobel Prize laureates, and other notable San Francisco Bay Area professionals reside or have resided in Kensington, such as University of California, Berkeley’s theoretical physicist and professor of physics Robert Oppenheimer who was the Director of the Manhattan Project’s Project Y that developed the atomic bombs during World War II.

KMAC is charged with land-use and development review and provides recommendations to the county planning and public works departments.

The East Bay Municipal Utility District supplies water and wastewater treatment services.

In 1831 his youngest son, Victor Castro, inherited the southern portion of the rancho, including what is now Kensington.

George Shima bought ten acres north of Cerrito Creek and east of the present day Arlington Avenue in about 1911, intending to build a home there.

In the 1920s, the East Bay Municipal Utility District (EBMUD) constructed an aqueduct through the Berkeley Hills to transport water from the San Pablo Reservoir to a still-active pumping facility in Kensington, located just above the Colusa Circle.

Some of the water received by this facility is pumped up the hill to the Summit Reservoir located at the top of Spruce Street.

During World War II, J. Robert Oppenheimer lived at 10 Kenilworth Court where he held meetings of the American Communist Party, while simultaneously working on top secret atomic bomb work, and denying any involvement with such political groups.

The streetcar was then replaced by an AC Transit bus route of the same number, which continues to run along Arlington Avenue.

The streetcar service played an important role in the development of Kensington, and was fed by a network of mid-block pedestrian paths, most of which persist to this day.

The pathways, which traverse Kensington, were offered for dedication for public use to the County of Contra Costa at the time the various subdivision maps were recorded.

Some of the pathways are used by the public regularly, and some have fallen into disuse, are overgrown with foliage, or have been absorbed into neighboring properties.

The late local historian Louis Stein Jr. lived and worked in Kensington, maintaining a pharmacy on the corner of Amherst and Arlington Avenue.

For many years, he kept one of the East Bay's oldest horsecars in his yard—one that had probably seen service between Temescal, Oakland and the University of California in Berkeley.

[12] According to the United States Census Bureau, the CDP has a total area of 1.0 square mile (2.6 km2).