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SPUR 2007 ANNUAL REPORT
PROGRAM UPDATES:
SPUR's Top Policy Goals for 2008
This article appears in the April 2008 issue of Urbanist
Economic Development
SPUR is reframing the debate about economic growth by addressing both equity and environmental concerns.
Much of the local political debate in the last few decades has been shaped by the emergence of interest groups that have an overt distrust of economic growth. This distrust comes from the perception that growth is uneven and causes unwanted disruptions to the urban community. Our goal is to build support for the idea that local economic and job growth is good for San Francisco and the region. This economic agenda is intimately connected to our regional smart growth agenda: locating jobs in San Francisco, where most employees do not have to drive to work, is the way to fight “office park” sprawl. We also want to ensure that policy goals are supportive of business formation, expansion and attraction.
The Future of Downtown
Almost 25 years ago, San Francisco approved the Downtown Plan, a landmark compromise in the City’s growth wars. The plan called for controlling the growth of the office district through restricting new high-rise buildings to the north and east and instead encouraged the central business district to grow south of Market Street. The essential vision of the Downtown Plan has been largely fulfilled. SPUR has been leading the effort to think about the future of downtown to make sure it can grow and evolve over the next few decades. In March 2007, we published a framework paper and began a series of meetings and discussions on the tradeoffs between our traditional “central business district” as a place of work and the idea of a “central social district” focused on housing, hotels, cultural institutions and entertainment. We also published an article on how Vancouver, British Columbia’s downtown residential boom has forced the to restrict residential development within the existing central business district.
SPUR will continue our work on this project throughout the next year. One of the major questions is whether or not downtown San Francisco has run out of sites for new office buildings. George Williams – a SPUR board member and one of the main authors of the Downtown Plan – has been leading our effort to identify ways in which downtown could grow within its existing footprint as well as key places for expansion. Ellen Lou from SOM has been leading our efforts to think about the urban form implications of growing the downtown. Stay tuned for “The Future of Downtown,” our latest policy paper on this topic, to be published in the Urbanist this summer.
Read our framework paper at www.spur.org/documents/030107_article_01.shtm.
SPUR helps shape the City’s Economic Strategy
After several years of analysis and review, the City released a draft Economic Development Strategy in 2006. Titled “Sustaining our Prosperity,” the report included a review of San Francisco’s economic performance, a summary of San Francisco’s main economic drivers and several policy goals and action items. SPUR has been closely involved in the development of the plan. For much of last year, we solicited input from a wide range of economic development experts and stakeholders and provided detailed comments on early drafts of the plan. Our comments were reflected in the full draft that was released last November.
Download the latest version of the draft plan at www.sfgov.org/site/economic_page.asp?id=37967.
Bay Area "cleantech" Study
Despite the growing national and regional interest in green businesses, there have been few attempts locally to understand the structure of this emerging industry. In 2007, SPUR launched a study of the Bay Area’s “cleantech” sector. As a member of the Mayor’s Clean Technology Advisory Council, we recognized the need for a comprehensive understanding of this emerging sector and an understanding of which segments are most competitive in San Francisco. Through the financial support of PG&E, we received funding to hire ICF International, the same firm that produced the City’s Economic Strategy, and Business Cluster Development. We have built a database of nearly 1,000 Bay Area cleantech firms and surveyed their business location decisions and perception of San Francisco. Stay tuned for the final results.
Free citywide wi-fi
Early in 2007, SPUR issued a white paper on the proposed contract between the City and a joint effort of Google and EarthLink, which would have provided citywide WiFi. We also called on the Board of Supervisors and San Francisco Public Utilities Commission to accept the Google/EarthLink contract. Our reasoning was simple: The deal on the table would bring free WiFi citywide at no cost to taxpayers. The alternative of municipal ownership and management of a WiFi system was risky and costly. We believed (and still do) that the City should not get into a new line of business and instead focus on its core priorities.
Economic briefing to City controller and mayor’s budget director
Each February, the Municipal Fiscal Advisory Committee, a project of SPUR, produces a conference with the Controller’s office on the city’s economy. The purpose of the event is to figure out how much money the City will collect in taxes in the coming years; validate the revenue projection assumptions of the Controller’s office over a one to three-year time frame; and bring together outside economists with the City’s leading budget and finance people, including the mayor’s budget director and staff across numerous departments. Each year we continue to receive invaluable insight and guidance from economists Kei Matsuda, Lynn Sedway and Cynthia Kroll. In recent years, while the state picture has been shaky, we continue to have predictions for healthy economic performance and revenue growth in San Francisco. Having just completed our 2008 briefing, the question remains whether these good budget trends will continue – especially as the City’s expenditures are increasing at a faster rate than revenues.
See the Controller’s preliminary revenue estimates at www.sfgov.org/site/controller_index.asp.
How to open a restaurant
Almost 99 percent of business establishments in San Francisco have less than 100 employees. One of the important segments of these “small businesses” are restaurants. At the request of the Mayor’s Office of Economic and Workforce Development and the City’s Small Business Commission, SPUR’s Municipal Fiscal Advisory Committee is spearheading a project to help map and reform the permit process for restaurants in San Francisco. We started by developing a step-by-step guide for all the permits required to open or expand a restaurant. In talking with City departments, permit expediters and new restaurant owners, the team has identified where in the process permits often get tied up and has been proposing changes to the system to make it easier. The team has been led by SPUR members Robert Klausner and Steve Mayer. We also worked closely with many City departments (the building, planning, health and fire departments, as well as the Entertainment Commission) on this initiative.
Eastern Neighborhoods rezoning
As one of the major planning projects of the last 10 years, the Eastern Neighborhoods rezoning effort cuts across many of SPUR’s program areas. The specific economic development concerns relate to how the plans treat office and industrial uses as well as the extent to which the plans will create job opportunities for people without college degrees. SPUR provided comments and feedback on how the plan supports the viability of existing light industry businesses as well as emerging digital media, biosciences and cleantech companies. We also recommended growing jobs in the “experience” and “human infrastructure” sectors – the two parts of the economy with the most job opportunities for people without college degrees.
Download SPUR’s memo on the Eastern Neighborhoods at: www.spur.org/misc_docs/spuren13008.pdf.
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