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May 29, 2012Reforming City Support for Urban Agriculture in San Francisco by Eli Zigas, Food Systems and Urban Agriculture Program ManagerSeven city agencies spent nearly a million dollars supporting urban agriculture projects in San Francisco in 2010-2011. Yet there is no single staff person responsible for coordinating that funding, nor any overarching goals for how the money is used. Urban agriculture legislation introduced on April 24 by Supervisor David Chiu, however, would change that.The proposed ordinance, which implements a number of the recommendations in SPUR’s recent report Public Harvest, would:Set goals, with...
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May 21, 2012Business Tax Reform Heads to November Ballot By Corey Marshall, Good Government Policy Director As the deadline rapidly approaches to submit measures for the November ballot, the City and County of San Francisco is moving ahead aggressively with its effort to reform the city’s business tax. While the city has made significant progress in recent weeks, there are some signs that the complexity and commitment to reform are being further complicated by increasing calls for a tax that would not just replace revenue from the existing payroll tax but bring the city additional funds.City...
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May 18, 2012At Last: Progress on Van Ness Bus Rapid Transit By Egon Terplan, Regional Planning DirectorAfter more than six years of planning, and six months after the release of a draft environmental impact report, we now have a clearer picture of what bus rapid transit on Van Ness Avenue might look like. This past Tuesday, the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA) unanimously approved a combination of two out of the four designs under consideration.Bus rapid transit (BRT) is similar to light rail in efficiency, but it uses buses instead of trains on tracks, which makes for lower...
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May 17, 2012Why We Need Hetch Hetchy More Than Ever By Laura Tam, Sustainable Development Policy DirectorHave you been to Hetch Hetchy Reservoir in Yosemite? Everyone who drinks water or takes a shower in San Francisco should go. It is spectacular: a miles-long placid blue lake nested within towering granite cliffs, from which waterfalls cascade. To visit the waterfalls or Yosemite’s northern backcountry, you walk across O’Shaughnessy Dam. It marks the first catchment in a 160-mile long water system that brings high quality, superb-tasting water to 2.6 million residents of the Bay Area...
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May 9, 2012What Can the Bay Area Learn From the First Crop of Sustainable Communities Strategies? By Jennifer WarburgIn recent months, Sacramento, Los Angeles and San Diego each passed their first Sustainable Communities Strategy (SCS) in response to Senate Bill 375, the 2008 state bill requiring each region in California to create a coordinated land use and transportation plan to reduce per capita greenhouse gas emissions from driving.We in the Bay Area have the advantage of being the last among the big regions to pass an SCS. What can we learn from the other regions about the implementation of SB 375 and...
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April 24, 2012Big Wins, Big Questions as High-Speed Rail Moves Ahead By Egon Terplan, Regional Planning DirectorEarlier this spring, high-speed rail in California took two very significant steps. First Bay Area leaders announced a plan to electrify Caltrain, which would make it possible for Caltrain and high-speed rail to share the same tracks between San Jose and San Francisco. Second the California High-Speed Rail Authority released an updated business plan that cuts the cost of the train system by a third.The new business plan (download the official summary here) still assumes an electrified train...
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April 24, 2012SF Works to Reform Its Business Tax By Corey Marshall, Good Government Policy Director For the last decade, businesses in San Francisco have been adamant that the city’s payroll tax is holding back job growth. First, companies must pay the tax when they reach $250,000 in payroll, which discourages new hiring. Second, they must pay it when employees exercise their stock options — a strong incentive for any company considering an IPO to leave the city. SPUR, along with much of the business community, has argued that we should restructure the city’s tax system to...
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April 10, 2012Rethinking Oakland's School Food Program by Eli Zigas, Food Systems and Urban Agriculture Program ManagerMeals cooked from scratch. At least a quarter of the ingredients locally sourced. Fresh produce from the 1.5-acre farm adjacent to the new central kitchen. These are just a few of the goals in a new vision for Oakland’s school food program detailed in a recently released report. The feasibility study, published by the non-profit Center for Ecoliteracy with the collaboration of the Oakland Unified School District (OUSD), looked at how Oakland’s school food program could be...
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April 9, 2012Creating a Community Vision for Stockton Street By Noah Christman, Deland Chan, Vivian Chang and Cindy WuThe Stockton Street Enhancement Project, spearheaded by Chinatown Community Development Center (CCDC) and SPUR, brought Chinatown and SPUR stakeholders together to discuss ways to preserve the economic and cultural vitality of Stockton Street while offering opportunity areas for improvement through the next decade. The project, made possible by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, included a walking tour and two workshops designed to address issues with the highly trafficked...
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April 5, 2012SF Approves First "Neighborhood Urban Agriculture" Permit by Eli Zigas, Food Systems and Urban Agriculture Program ManagerOn March 9, 2012, San Francisco issued its first zoning permit for “neighborhood urban agriculture.” The change of use permit, given to Little City Gardens, allows the small urban farming business to grow produce for sale at its three-quarter-acre market garden in the Mission Terrace neighborhood. It is the first permit issued under San Francisco’s pioneering urban agriculture zoning guidelines, which Mayor Lee signed into law in April 2011. The permit is both a...
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