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“The students are here.” 

The phrase can be heard, mumbled under the breath, as Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley once again begins to brim with blue and gold, and backpacked figures make their way across campus, lumbering through Sproul Plaza on their way to Sather Gate. 

It’s getting close to the start of the new school year at the University of California at Berkeley. For most of this year's 31,500 students, classes begin today. 

But the arrival of the students, a tradition as true as the yearly return of the swallows to San Juan Capistrano, is already evident. 

You can tell that the students are here by the way that around campus and environs, moving trucks are double parked, and the dwarf refrigerators — staples of college life — have begun to make their annual appearance. 

You can tell, too, by the longer lines at Blondie’s and Fat Slice, two by-the slice pizza shops just a block apart from each other along Telegraph Avenue. 

Elias Haro, manager at Fat Slice Pizza, has no doubt that the migration has begun. 

“It gets really busy,” Haro said. “You see just by looking out into the sidewalks that they're here.” 

Over on Bancroft Avenue, at Ned's Berkeley Bookstore, Todd Roe has been experiencing the bustle of it all for five years. A college textbook store is a good barometer of the students’ return, and over the years, Roe has become an expert reader. 

It’s a cycle, he explains, which starts a week before classes begin. The freshmen come in and pick up their books first. There’s only a few of them in the initial days, then toward the middle of the week, the bulk of them come and then fade by Friday. 

The lull is not lasting because it is followed by the “mad dash,” when the rest of the students return and scramble to find the books they need for their classes during the first week of class, Roe says. 

After a couple of weeks, when the book returns and exchanges are complete, the influx is done, and except for the occasional stragglers who decide to wait to look for their books until they need them for midterms, it all slows down, Roe said. 

“Right now we are basically at the bottom of the trough,” Roe said Friday, sounding like a man piling sandbags in preparation for a storm.  

“We’ve finished with the freshmen — about 75 percent of them — and we’re getting ready for the other 75 percent of the students.'' 

This year’s freshman class is made up of 3,955 first-year students, 1,728 transfers and 2,590 students pursuing graduate degrees. 

For a second year in a row, a majority of the first-year students — or about 55 percent — are women, a record-breaker that began last year, and which hadn’t been broken since World War II. 

The youngest incoming student is 15 years old. The incoming class also boasts a 69-year-old woman, who is a transfer student, as well as a 68-year old man, who is also transferring to Cal. 

All of the freshmen students who requested on-campus housing have been offered spaces in the residence halls. 

For returning students who are living off-campus, there is good news on the housing front. 

Finding a place to live will be easier this year than in the recent past. The days of sleeping on friends’ couches and living out of boxes and suitcases because of the tight market seem to be over. 

“[House Hunting] is certainly easier than it was last year,” said Becky White, assistant director at Cal Rentals, the university’s housing referral and counseling center.  

“A lot of it is due to the demise of so many young startups, whose employees were in direct competition with our students for housing.” 

In addition to the lack of competition, prices, too, have gone down, White noted.  

The average student apartment, which was going for $981 a month in July, now rents for $955. One-bedroom apartments, which went for $1,375 rents on average last month, are listed at $1,256. 

By this point, with classes so near, the majority of this year’s students have already secured a place to live. School officials, however, are working to make sure that those dwellings are safe. 

In an effort to prevent any deaths from fires, like the ones that took the lives of two of the university’s students last school year, university officials are making sure that all student housing units — both on and off campus — have working smoke detectors. 

The Berkeley Fire Department is providing the potentially life-saving devices free of charge for students living in the city. It is also providing free window bar testing.