Brentwood is a city in the far eastern reaches of Contra Costa County, California, positioned in the East Bay where the Bay Area's suburban edge meets the San Joaquin–Sacramento River Delta. Mount Diablo rises to the west, and the Central Valley opens to the east. For most of its history, Brentwood was a small agricultural community, settled in the late 1800s on fertile, irrigated land and built around orchards and row crops. Even as the city has suburbanized, it has kept a strong identity as the Bay Area's farm basket, celebrated for its cherries, sweet corn, and peaches. That agricultural legacy now coexists with one of the fastest periods of residential growth in the region. Brentwood's population climbed from roughly 23,000 in 2000 to about 67,000 by the early 2020s, transforming open farmland into a series of master-planned communities. Newer neighborhoods with greenbelts, trails, and parks now ring an older downtown that retains its small-town character. The city's growth has been shaped by its location at the edge of the Bay Area's commute shed. Without a BART station, Brentwood relies on State Route 4 and Vasco Road for access to Livermore, the Tri-Valley, and, ultimately, job centers in Oakland, San Francisco, and Silicon Valley. As a result, Brentwood functions as a more affordable, family-oriented alternative for people willing to trade commute time for newer housing, larger homes, and a slower, outdoors-and-agriculture-flavored pace of life. The mix of orchards, subdivisions, and open Delta landscape gives the city a character distinct from the denser inner East Bay.