THE HISTORY OF SPUR
In 1999 we marked the 40th anniversary of the creation of SPUR, then known as the San Francisco Planning and Urban Renewal Association. Through the 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s, SPUR has served as San Francisco's major citizen planning organization, bringing together active citizens, public servants, business leaders, and elected officials to thoughtfully plan for the future of San Francisco.
Those of us who are with SPUR now feel a great deal of pride in the accomplishments of our predecessors, although always, with the benefit of hindsight, there are things we can see more clearly now. That a member-supported, volunteer-based think tank can offer so much to a city over such a long period of time is cause for celebration. Throughout the year, we will be sponsoring activities to honor the great civic leaders who have had an impact on our city through their work at SPUR.
But beyond celebration, we think the best way to honor our legacy is to understand it. We intend to use the occasion of our 40th year as an opportunity for a critical examination of SPUR's past. To inaugurate this process, we present in this newsletter a brief overview of SPUR's history, from our predecessor organizations at the turn of the century to the present.
Many were part of SPUR since the early days and have experienced these events first hand; others may be new to the city. All of us can learn from the successes, failures, and insights of those who came before us.
The Roots of SPUR
SPUR's predecessor was established in 1910 by a group of young civic leaders who were concerned about the proliferation of much needed but substandard housing following the 1906 earthquake. Founders such as Alice Griffith and Dr. Langley Porter formed the San Francisco Housing Association to educate the public about the need for housing regulations and to lobby Sacramento for anti-tenement legislation. The result, following a hard-hitting report by the Association, was the State Tenement House Act of 1911, which made inadequate housing construction illegal.
The Association continued to be an active voice for housing concerns through the 1930s. It supported creation of federal public housing legislation during the Depression and persuaded San Francisco to create the first public housing authority in the nation, even before the federal legislation was signed into law.
In the 1940s, a new group of civic activists became involved in the Association. The group consisted of graduates from the University of California's city planning program, who referred to themselves as "Telesis". Walter Landor, an original member of that group, later recommended the name for Pacific Telesis' corporate identity. Telesis aggressively advocated the value of city planning for shaping a community's development. Telesis' involvement caused the Association to expand its mandate and become the San Francisco Planning and Housing Association in 1942, with Morse Erskine as the new president. On the cover of the Association's membership brochure, they quoted Lewis Mumford,
"A community that does not plan and build the necessary structures for the common life will remain under a perpetual weight and handicap; its buildings may tower against the skies, but its actual social stature may be smaller, measured by effective accomplishment, than a decent country town."
The Association's first major effort was to push for a full-time City Planning Department. The department was created in 1942, making San Francisco one of the last major American cities to have a City Planning Department. Jerd Sullivan, who would help form SPUR fifteen years later, chaired a citizen's Master Plan Committee, which presented San Francisco's first master plan to the community in 1945.
The Association also urged San Francisco to take advantage of legal and financial tools available under state and federal redevelopment laws passed, respectively, in 1947 and 1949. The San Francisco Redevelopment Agency was formed in 1949.
Additionally, in 1947 the Association initiated the planning efforts that would finally culminate in the Bay Area Rapid Transit District.
Suburbs vs. City
San Francisco's late adoption of basic city planning tools was not nearly enough to cope with the entirely new set of problems that emerged after World War II. A set of anti-urban social forces took the form not of an assault on central cities, but of an abandonment of them:
Federal highway subsidies which continued New Deal federal spending levels, but did so in a way that often managed to simultaneously demolish intact towns, neighborhoods, or farms while at the same time subsidizing access to widely dispersed settlement patterns;
Capital flight to suburbs, or "sunbelt" cities, triggered by businesses seeking to escape the deterioration of older cities and the strength that organized labor enjoyed in them;
The federal mortgage deduction which enabled people to seek privacy, cultural homogeneity, green space, and other aspects of a non-urban "American dream" through home ownership
San Francisco faced the specter of both capital and population flight. SPUR was organized in 1959 as a way to fight for the vitality and continued evolution of the big city as opposed to the suburb. Although SPUR's planning approach has changed dramatically over the years-we now tend to draw more from Jane Jacobs than from Lewis Mumford-the core purpose of organizing to maintain and strengthen the city remains unchanged.
Across the country, the civic leaders of America's big cities had given the name "urban renewal" to these efforts. Urban renewal was both a political approach for re-claiming federal subsidies from suburban to urban uses and a city planning approach that called for rebuilding economically depressed urban areas in the image of a "well-planned," "modern," or "functional" city.
For citizens who saw urban renewal as the only hope for the continued existence of cities, San Francisco in the 1950s held ominous signs. Three redevelopment project areas had been designated: the Golden Gateway, the Western Addition and Diamond Heights. But in 1958, Time Magazine ran an article criticizing San Francisco's inability to get anything done after the war. The article pointed out that the Crown Zellerbach Building was the only new downtown building since World War II. San Francisco was in the economic doldrums while Bay Area suburbs were exploding.
In the closing years of the 1950s, Dorothy Erskine, a director of the San Francisco Planning and Housing Association, led a movement to reorganize San Francisco's power structure for a last ditch effort to save the city.
First, in 1958, she helped found Citizens for Regional Recreation and Parks (later renamed People for Open Space, and then Greenbelt Alliance), to preserve open space in the Bay Area from low-density sprawl development.
But that was to be just the start. Erskine knew, more than 40 years ago, that stopping suburban sprawl can only work if at the same time development is redirected back into existing urban areas. The next year, Erskine asked Jerd Sullivan, Chief Executive Officer for Crocker Bank and another Planning and Housing Association director, to call an informal meeting of the Blyth-Zellerbach Committee, a group composed of the heads of major corporations based in San Francisco. At that meeting, Erskine presented San Francisco's top echelon of business leadership with a plan to jump-start urban renewal. Forty years ago, San Francisco was obviously a quite different place than it is today, when a small group of civic leaders could have had such influence on the city.
The Creation of SPUR
In 1959, at Erskine's request, the Blyth-Zellerbach Committee brought in Aaron Levine, the Executive Director of the Philadelphia Citizens' Council on City Planning, to evaluate the success of city planning and urban renewal in revitalizing San Francisco. The May 1, 1959, San Francisco News carried a story titled, "What Levine Thought of SF,"
San Francisco has known all along that it was falling behind in its program of urban renewal.
But it didn't know quite how far behind until the shocking report of Philadelphia expert Aaron Levine this week summed up our place in the list of cities that "know how" to modernize. That place is at the bottom . . . 99th among the 100 first cities of the nation.
Words like "obsolescence" and "physical deterioration" dot the Levine description of San Francisco and its half-hearted efforts at self-preservation.
Levine told the city, "It cannot be stressed enough that a complete teamwork approach of political leadership, renewal agency initiative, planning department skill and citizen participation, is the essential ingredient for urban renewal." He warned that unless urban renewal activities were quickly enacted, blight would spread and that downtown itself faced the prospect of serious decay. Levine suggested that San Francisco needed a new and dynamic redevelopment agency and director, but also needed strong civic/business support for this program.
Jerd Sullivan, with fellow businessmen Jack Merrill and Everett Griffin, held a meeting with then Mayor George Christopher to discuss the need for both a new director and a new thrust in redevelopment. The result was that Griffin, a retired businessman, was appointed chairman of the Redevelopment Agency, and Justin Herman was recruited from the federal Housing and Home Finance Agency (HHFA) to be the Agency's new Executive Director. The decision was also made to make the agency an autonomous organization free of direct control by city hall because Levine recommended that San Francisco have an independent redevelopment agency with its own independent staff.
The League of Women Voters spearheaded the movement for the citizens' organization Levine had called for by convening a meeting at City Hall. The San Francisco Planning and Housing Association was reorganized into the San Francisco Planning and Urban Renewal Association, to be the citizens' voice for good planning and to speed up the redevelopment process. The Blyth-Zellerbach Committee agreed to provide funding for the organization with "no strings attached," but with the proviso that the group should expand its membership base so that it would not be financially dependent on the business community.
This new organization merged with the Citizens Participation Committee for Urban Renewal, a committee of 18 people appointed by the mayor and required by the HHFA to be the official citizens advisory group to the redevelopment agency. In this official status, the organization was able to provide more direct support to the urban renewal program while fulfilling the federal government's "Workable Program" requirements.
In October of 1959, SPUR hired its first Executive Director, John Hirten, who had most recently served as executive director of the Stockton Redevelopment Agency. Al Baum, a young attorney who was the first chair of the association's City Planning Committee, later coined the acronym SPUR. SPUR organized itself into seven volunteer committees, each with its own chairman, reflecting a core set of planning and policy concerns:
Community Information (Mrs. Alvin Rockwell)
Master Plan Committee (Robert Lilienthal)
Public Administration Committee (Roger Lapham, Jr.)
Redevelopment Projects Committee (Lawrence Lackey)
Renewal Process Committee (Kirk Whitehead)
Environmental Design Committee (John Hirten)
Regional Planning Committee (Mel Scott)
The rest, as they say, is history.
Market Street Redesign
In 1962, the Bay Area Rapid Transit System (BART) was approved. SPUR had been responsible for much of the grassroots work in supporting the BART measure. The plan called for digging up Market Street, San Francisco's principal downtown thoroughfare, and putting it back just the way it had been before. A special committee lead by architect Ed Farrell was shocked by the impact of a seventy-five foot excavation cut down the middle of this street. They realized that this presented a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to ask the question, how should Market Street be designed when it gets put back together?
SPUR called for a plan and got the Market Street property owners to provide the money to do a preliminary study. SPUR contacted David Zellerbach who in turn directed Lowell Clucas, Director of Corporate Communications at Crown-Zellerbach, to work with SPUR on a day-to-day basis to organize Blyth-Zellerbach involvement. Clucas and Hirten set up a meeting of Market Street businessmen in the boardroom of Crown-Zellerbach where a slide presentation was given. SPUR announced at the meeting that it needed $12,000 for a study titled What to do About Market Street. Walter Shorenstein, a major property owner on Market Street, came forward with a $1,000 check and the balance of the needed $12,000 was raised at the meeting.
Lawrence Livingston, Jr., George Rockrise and Lawrence Halprin performed the study and John Hirten wrote the action plan.
The report proposed a series of innovative design features, including a landscaped center island, wide enough for art and a pedestrian promenade; public plazas at various points; and open-air BART stations.
In what would become a model to be repeated in SPUR's future, the result was the formation of a spin-off of SPUR, the Market Street Development Corporation. The city appropriated money for an architectural and engineering plan with the end result being the $27 million bond issue for the redesign of Market Street, which was approved in 1968 by a 70% vote.
Most of SPUR's specific design recommendations were not implemented. The major impact of What to Do About Market Street lies in the fact that it mobilized public investment as a way to encourage serious street design and the subsequent flood of private investment along one of the most central streets in the entire Bay Area.
The Embarcadero BART Station
BART was planned without what is now the Embarcadero Station. The State had agreed to fund BART from the first east bay station to the first San Francisco station. This encouraged BART planners to position those stations as far from the Bay as possible, meaning that the Montgomery station would be San Francisco's last stop before the tunnel to Oakland. SPUR recognized that new development, stimulated by the Redevelopment Area, was rapidly moving east of the Montgomery Street Station and an additional stop was going to be vital.
John Jacobs, then Deputy Director of SPUR, described what happened next:
"SPUR realized that somehow another station had to be financed. One day while shaving at home I came up with the idea of expanding the Golden Gate Redevelopment Project and selling tax bonds to finance the new station. Well, once Terrell Hill, who was our Transportation Committee Chairman and a BART fanatic, heard about this, he was out the door in a flash, lobbying for the boundary change and raising some $250,000 for designing the new station."
SPUR proposed realigning the Golden Gateway Redevelopment Project to include the new Embarcadero Station so that it would be eligible for tax increment financing to pay for the estimated $35 million cost. This was done under the direction of Justin Herman. Without that contribution it is very likely BART today would be without the crucial Embarcadero Station.
Bay Conservation and Development Commission
In 1963, State Senator Eugene J. McAteer of San Francisco authored a bill directing a study for a bridge continuing from the Embarcadero Freeway to North Beach in San Francisco and to Marin County by way of Angel Island. William Roth, the Chairman of SPUR's Executive Committee, John Hirten, and Joseph Bodovitz, then SPUR's Deputy Director, visited Senator McAteer. They convinced the senator that a bridge wiping out Telegraph Hill would be a mistake. They further encouraged him to drop the project and instead support a Bay plan for the future.
About the same time, Professor Mel Scott had just published a book entitled The Future of San Francisco Bay, which described the diminishing of the bay through landfill and shoreline development. Working behind the scenes for some time were Catherine Kerr, Esther Gulick, Sylvia McLaughlin and Dorothy Erskine, whose motivation saved bay tidelands in the Berkeley area and later helped form the Save San Francisco Bay Association. Encouraged by these women, Save the Bay, and SPUR, Sen. McAteer introduced a bill calling for a study of the multiple issues affecting the Bay, but particularly of pressures to fill large areas.
The study was to be conducted by a state commission with a four-month life. Sen. McAteer became chairman and asked SPUR to lend Joe Bodovitz to be its staff. Roth and Hirten agreed to do so. As a result of the Commission's work, the McAteer-Petris Act was signed into law in 1965, creating the San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission. Bodovitz became its first executive director.
Return of the Port of San Francisco
Michael Marston, a professional economist with a local consulting firm, who was chairman of SPUR's Waterfront Committee at the time, was continually holding meetings discussing future directions for San Francisco's waterfront. The problem was that the Port of San Francisco, under state ownership since 1863, had been allowed to become obsolete. At that time, every other port had converted to container operation while the port of San Francisco was still doing break bulk freight. This situation was reinforced by the fact that San Francisco lacked the back-up storage areas inland from the piers to handle containers, although the future success of container operation had not yet become clear.
The Port of Oakland, owned and run by the City of Oakland, was eligible for Federal Economic Development grants. This enabled Oakland to appropriate money or to raise bond issues to match the Federal monies in order to develop a deeper harbor and better access. Meanwhile the Port of San Francisco was not eligible for Federal economic development funds because it was owned by the State. As a result, it was losing shipping and was becoming commercially unviable.
Taking account of this troubling reality, SPUR decided it was time to get the Port back from the state. The state was, in fact, willing to sell the Port to San Francisco, but proposed a price of $350 million based on its real estate value. Marston and his partner, Jerry Kaiser, countered that the city should be able to assume ownership of the Port not by buying it as real estate, but by assuming its $60 million operations debt from the state. SPUR asked Gwen Follis, Chairman of Standard Oil of California (Chevron) and head of the Blyth-Zellerbach Committee, to form a "Blue Ribbon Committee." The committee included Cyril Magnin of Joseph Magnin Department Stores and Ralph Davies, Chairman of Natoma and America Presidents Line.
The committee proposed a special bill and, with the help of Mayor Alioto, a preliminary bill was drawn up for returning the port to San Francisco at no cost, with the city assuming the debt. This bill became the Burton Act and passed in 1969, which enabled San Francisco to regain control of its port.
The Golden Gate National Recreation Area
In response to a number of battles over the disposition of under-used military lands in San Francisco and Marin Counties, SPUR lent support to a campaign to establish the Golden Gate National Recreation Area (GGNRA). SPUR helped create People For a GGNRA under the co-chairmanship of Edgar Wayburn and Amy Meyer to provide an ongoing entity to push the legislation and oversee its implementation.
Amy Meyer credits SPUR with a vital role in nurturing citizen activism:
"SPUR made the first printed maps of the proposed GGNRA and printed them in its February 1971 newsletter. It helped People for a GGNRA to produce its own fact sheets and taught us how to run a local campaign. SPUR showed us how to raise money, how to approach supervisors, how to put out mailings. Remember-the tools of the day were mimeograph machines (we used SPUR's), telephones, and electric typewriters. It's amazing how much we were able to get out by hand."
Mike Fischer, then Deputy Director at SPUR, describes how the campaign came together:
"I think the creation of the GGNRA was a major success for SPUR. The Federal Government wanted to sell Fort Mason to the city and in exchange the city would trade Fort Mason to developers. In the exchange the developers would build a new Federal Building but they would also be able to build apartments at Fort Mason. SPUR fought against this and several other proposals including development in the Presidio, Lamar Hunt's idea of an Alcatraz casino, and a warehouse for veterans' x-rays at Fort Miley. After each battle we wondered when we were going to lose. One day we were out at Fort Miley and the idea came to us that a federal park would be perfect."
With literally dozens of development proposals for different military lands, it became clear that fighting each one separately was a losing strategy. The visionary step of imagining the entire complex of forts and the Presidio as one national park opened the way to the federal legislative strategy which led, ultimately, to the establishment of the GGNRA in 1972.
The First Muni Report
In 1973 SPUR's Transportation Committee, chaired by John Holt, undertook an in-depth analysis of the City's Municipal Railway, publishing a report called Building a New Muni. The analysis revealed a pattern of budget cuts from the Board of Supervisors, too few drivers to cover schedules, inadequate supervision, a broken civil service system, a non-existent public information budget, and an ineffective interagency communication process, among other problems. The system was inefficiently run, service was poor, and morale was low.
The report identified the Mission and Bayview-Hunters Point as neighborhoods that were particularly under-served, bearing the brunt of recent service cuts. And in perhaps one of the most far-reaching recommendations, SPUR also called on the city to adopt a "transit-first" policy.
This was a classic SPUR Report, researched and written entirely by volunteer committee members. Underwritten by member contributions, this report was the stimulus to start a chain of public policy decisions. Muni hired more drivers and, as SPUR predicted, reduced missed runs, sick days off, and overall compensation expense by significantly reducing overtime required to meet Muni's schedule.
It is generally acknowledged that SPUR's work had direct and positive impact on Muni for approximately ten years, but then, as in all bureaucracies, lessons were forgotten, old patterns returned, and some new problems emerged. In 1995, SPUR began the latest phase of Muni renewal with a charter amendment expected to be on the November 1999 ballot.
Fiscal Reporting Reform
In 1975, there was increasing concern around the country about municipal fiscal solvency. At this time the City's financial situation was not bright. SPUR cited a Congressional Budget Office study which found that San Francisco was second only to New York in public spending and public employees per capita. While this is not totally unreasonable, as San Francisco is both a city and a County, this was at a time when New York was facing bankruptcy. There was good reason for San Francisco to take dramatic action to get its fiscal house in order.
SPUR's first step was to propose reform for the City's employee salary setting procedures. Former SPUR Executive Director Michael McGill recalls how SPUR pursued this effort.
"This came on the heels of a recent police and fire fighters' strike. Prior to that event, every effort to reform the system by Charter amendment had failed. SPUR was able to convince the Board of Supervisors to place a package of reform measures on the next election ballot. The Board was divided over which measures to pursue. I told them it was imperative that they agree unanimously to one package so that the public would not be confused by a series of competing proposals."
"The Board agreed to place a single package on the ballot competing with two proposals by labor's supporters which would give labor what they had been asking for in return for a pledge not to strike, including binding arbitration. Then both sides went to the voters with a campaign saying 'end public employee strikes, vote yes for our proposition.' The voters adopted the Supervisors' pro-reform package by margins of 3 and 4 to 1, and defeating the competing measures by the same margin. Further reforms were placed on the ballot at SPUR's suggestion in subsequent years; there was one unsuccessful strike after that; and San Francisco has not had a public employee strike since then."
Under the sponsorship of the newly formed City Management and Finance Committee co-chaired by Chip Fussell and Frank Petro, SPUR proposed revisions to the City's annual financial report. Working with Mayor George Moscone and Deputy Mayor Rudy Nothenberg, the Big 8 accounting firm, Arthur Young, was retained with a grant from the San Francisco Foundation to create a consolidated annual report that would clearly and consistently describe the financial condition of the City.
Waterfront Study
When San Francisco regained control of the port from the state in 1969, its intention was to manage this source to benefit the City of San Francisco. By 1984, the port's modernization of its cargo handling capabilities had begun to bear fruit and a $42.5 million revenue bond issue for further improvements was passed by the voters.
While SPUR supported these improvements, it was also concerned about the port's future. SPUR Waterfront Chairman, Tom Lollini, was concerned that the port was overexpanding capacity in a shrinking regional market and that competing with Oakland for local trade was, perhaps, short-sighted. SPUR was also concerned that the port had become singularly preoccupied with industrial maritime activities which required substantial subsidies and had not developed a strategy to enhance its non-maritime, income-producing operations sufficiently to pay for these costs.
In 1985, the SPUR Waterfront Task Force was organized into four committees: Maritime, Transportation, Open Space and Development. A series of committee meetings over a two year period resulted in four position papers which were distilled into two SPUR Reports. The process culminated in an annual conference in 1986 entitled "On the Waterfront," at which SPUR's analysis and recommendations were presented.
SPUR recommended a wide range of actions that would enable the port to aggressively manage its assets for the benefit of the entire city. These recommendations included financial, administrative and managerial changes and a strong proposal to put non-maritime development on an equal footing with more traditional, industrial waterfront uses.
The end result was, 1) the port re-organized its staff and its accounting procedures to manage its assets more effectively; 2) the port revamped its strategic plan to include maritime and non-maritime projects; 3) the city undertook the development of a world-class boulevard along the Embarcadero which worked to knit the city and the Bay back together.
Charter Reform
For over thirty years, SPUR has been an active and visible participant in myriad efforts to forge a consensus on a major package of charter reform. Fundamental reform of the City's charter - our constitution - has long been central to many of SPUR's goals for San Francisco. And on July 1, 1996 that new charter went into effect.
Ever since James Phelan and San Francisco progressives achieved self-rule in 1898 through the first City charter, the charter has been an integral part of reform efforts. The goal then as now was honest, efficient and responsive City Government.
Reformers in the 1920's, reacting to corruption under San Francisco's then "strong mayor" form of government, succeeded in voter adoption of a new City charter of 1932, with a "chief administrative officer", a political compromise between the strong mayor and the "city manager" forms of government. Its deficiencies were manifest shortly after its adoption - blurred lines of authority, responsibility and accountability, and an undue focus on the "how" of city government, rather than the "what".
At least six charter reform committees were established in the ensuing 40 years. In 1968 the Board of Supervisor's established a Citizen's Charter Revision Committee on which SPUR leaders Alvin Baum Jr. and James Frankel served. The committee proposed a modern management style government and a wholly new City charter which antagonized numerous vested interests and was overwhelmingly rejected by the voters.
In 1977 the Board of Supervisors put a measure on the ballot to establish an elected Charter Commission. SPUR activists Preston Cook, James Haas and Allen Haile were elected to the commission. After 18 months of work and an expenditure of over $300,000 the Commission produced a new charter recommendation. Again, this charter lost at the polls, but by a closer vote.
With the passing of another fifteen years, the deficiencies of the City charter again gained the public's attention. A measure was successfully put on the ballot in 1993 directing the Mayor, the Board of Supervisors and the former Chief Administrative Officer, with the help of a citizens advisory committee, to recommend charter reforms. The Board of Supervisors, faced with this task and few resources, took the draft 1980 charter, updated it to reflect the subsequent changes passed by the voters, sought public comment and revised it accordingly. SPUR members James Lazarus and Peter Henschel, who were then Deputy Mayors, and James Haas were key to these efforts. At the eleventh hour, the Supervisors had a failure of will, and declined to place the measure on the fall 1994 ballot.
Shortly thereafter, Supervisor Barbara Kaufman took up the gauntlet of civic reform and spent the next year revising and massaging the draft charter. The SPUR board was an active participant in the process, suggesting changes, carrying them to the community, building consensus, and then actively educating the electorate in the ballot campaign.
Nearly 65 years after the previous charter was adopted and nearly 100 years after the first efforts to bring good government to San Francisco, the 1996 Charter was passed, with SPUR in a singular and ongoing role. The new charter reduces the document from over 300 pages to less than 100; puts the mayor, assisted by a professional city administrator, in charge of day to day management of all city departments; allows elected officials to set policy through the budget process; makes elected officials accountable to the public, rather than relying on unelected appointed commissions; and removes many restrictions to modern management.
However, in spite of this achievement, the goal of honest, efficient and responsive government for San Francisco is not complete. The mayor has yet to use one the most powerful tools, the ability to reorganize the executive branch departments. However, elected officials are no longer able to hide behind the charter, since authority, responsibility and accountability are clear. Under the new charter, SPUR is continuing to work for modern, accountable execution of government.
Waterfront Master Plan
Despite the best efforts of SPUR and others, the decline of the port continued as the basic nature of international shipping changed. Larger vessels carrying ever increasing container tonnage required massive container storage space at the piers and equally large rail capacity to the interior of the country. Furthermore, freight arriving at the Port of Oakland was (and still is) a full two days closer to eastward destinations than San Francisco. San Francisco could not compete with Oakland, much less with Seattle or LA/Long Beach on any of these fronts.
Commercial uses began to take the place of the now defunct maritime uses, which helped reunite San Francisco with its historic waterfront, finding a productive public use for the land and generating revenue for the port. Not understanding that industrial uses along the northern waterfront were already gone forever, and confusing a land-use type (hotels) with a building type (high rises), San Francisco voters narrowly passed Proposition H, the waterfront planning proposition, in 1990. It forbade hotels on the waterfront, and indeed, any development until a master plan was developed by the port. Its proponents claimed at the time that the planning process for a new Waterfront Plan would take 180 days. In fact, the Port Commission was not able to adopt a plan until June 1997, some six years plus 180 days after the vote! The process included over 100 hearings, and all the while new use of the port's derelict properties was stymied.
During this time, SPUR's waterfront committee, under the chairmanship of Jeff Heller and later joined by Teresa Rea, worked in collaboration with all interested constituencies, sometimes on a daily basis, to create a viable framework for the waterfront's future. The Plan, finally approved, strikes a balance between maritime and non-maritime objectives, between a working waterfront and a commercial/recreational district, and between redevelopment of port facilities and the creation of more public access/open space. SPUR's role in the 1990's was to find a way to balance the varied and often conflicting demands on a scarce public resource. The northern waterfront is now poised to financially revitalize the port, bring new vitality to the waterfront, and finally to reunite San Franciscans with the Bay. It will become a new kind of waterfront, with uses tied to the unique location on the Bay, but in no way the industrial waterfront of an earlier era. North of China Basin Channel, non-cargo maritime uses such as
fishing, ferries and recreational boating will be encouraged. The southern waterfront remains underutilized, although the port is actively pursuing new maritime-related tenants. While "reserved" for cargo uses today, its long-term future remains uncertain.
Conclusion
SPUR's mission is to develop balanced, informed and innovative solutions to urban problems in order to improve the quality of urban life and to promote greater understanding of urban issues facing San Francisco today. While SPUR is an organization that was formed around a single issue, it has continued to grow and encompass a broader range of issues. Though it was formed by a small homogenous group, it has become as diverse and multi-talented as our city itself.
SPUR brings together business, professional and civic-minded San Franciscans representing a wide variety of viewpoints. The deliberations that come from this diversity in many cases create a proxy for the city as a whole. If the SPUR Board of Directors can accept a particular solution for a policy problem facing the city, that solution frequently has a reasonable chance for acceptance by the city as a whole.
SPUR's name implies that it is a prod to action. SPUR is today, as it has been for forty years, an activist urban think tank and an "honest broker" attempting to bring various elements of the public policy community together to enhance the livability and vitality of San Francisco. SPUR has remained, over a period of four decades, a strong, articulate voice in addressing issues of key concern to San Francisco and the Bay Area.
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