SPUR Publications

This summer, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors voted unanimously to adopt legislation that makes big changes to the city’s affordable housing requirements for residential development. SPUR is happy to see the supervisors coming together on a contentious issue, but we remain concerned that the new requirements are not financially feasible and will result in less affordable housing actually getting built.

Both San Diego and San Jose are growing rapidly. Both cities have adopted general plans that direct new growth into “urban villages.” At a recent SPUR forum, two urban planners from San Diego discussed key challenges and lessons learned with San Jose’s planning staff and the community.

Just months after the U.S. decision to withdrawal from the Paris Climate Accord, California made its latest move in climate leadership when Governor Brown signed AB 398, extending the state’s landmark cap-and-trade program for 13 more years. The new law passed with a bipartisan super-majority, signaling to innovators and investors that California is the place to advance carbon-free technologies and businesses.

Oakland's Downtown Specific Plan process has restarted with a full calendar of public workshops and events. Though residential construction is underway downtown, commercial construction is still lagging — and neither is enough to mitigate displacement. The best way to maintain Oakland’s cultural dynamism and diversity is to plan for growth that provides benefits to all. Here's how to get involved in shaping the plan.

While many efforts are underway to assess the Bay Area’s vulnerability to climate change, there hasn’t been a framework for evaluating which strategies will be appropriate for our shoreline’s many different settings — from wetlands to recreational attractions to industrial sites. SPUR is launching a new project that will define different segments of the shoreline so that we can develop integrated adaptation strategies for each.

With so many transportation agencies in the Bay Area, different entities often end up planning and building pieces of the same project. That’s happening right now on a grand scale: There are no less than five megaprojects taking place between San Jose and Oakland. If planned right they could add up to much more than the sum of their parts.

What would it look like if we put people at the center of transit planning — if we designed a friendly system grounded in the needs, wants and preferences of all riders? Would transit be more useful? Would more people ride it? To help transportation planners understand riders as customers, SPUR recently hosted the third annual Transit + Design Workshop.

Over the next decade, more than $10 billion of transportation investments will start to remake San Jose’s Diridon Station into the first high-speed rail station in the country and the busiest transportation hub west of the Mississippi. This historic opportunity has the potential to reshape the entire South Bay. SPUR proposes seven principles that should guide planning, land use and transportation decisions at Diridon.

Last month, San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee signed the HOME-SF program into law. The new law encourages housing developers to provide 30 percent of new units to low- and moderate-income households in exchange for permission to build bigger. The program will help to fill San Francisco’s growing need for housing, particularly for middle-income households that have not been well-served in the past.

As the pace of residential development picks up in downtown Oakland and the Broadway-Valdez area, it’s worth remembering that Oakland is much, much bigger than those two small neighborhoods and that very little is being built anywhere else. If we really want to alleviate the housing shortage, we need to build much more housing, in many more parts of the city.

The Brisbane City Council will decide this summer whether to allow 4,400 housing units and 7 million square feet of commercial space within walking distance of an underutilized Caltrain station. Seems like the perfect place for homes, amenities and jobs, but so far the Brisbane Planning Commission has favored a low-density plan with no housing. Here’s why this matters — to all of us.

Now that Caltrain’s electrification project has federal funding, leaders and the public can start designing the Caltrain of the future. Finishing the $2.25 billion modernization project will mark the beginning of a completely new era for the railroad. As Caltrain begins the process of developing a business plan, here are five important questions we think the business plan should tackle.

The number of proposed developments in downtown San Jose is up — but only one project broke ground in the last year. Blocks are filling in with new businesses — but beloved Camera 12 Cinemas has shut its doors. These mixed signals make it hard to predict what the market will do next, but we’ve seen three clear trends play out in recent months.

The rate of increase in rents and home sale prices may have slowed, but Oakland still has the fourth highest rents in the nation, and housing remains unaffordable to too many. In 2016, the city set high goals for addressing the housing shortage — but how much progress has been made since then?