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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
Disaster Planning
When a major earthquake strikes the Bay Area, the City will face thousands of casualties, hundreds of thousands of displaced households and losses in the hundreds of billions of dollars.
Recovery will take years. Some of SPUR’s most important work focuses on planning to minimize the impacts of such a disaster and maximizing the ability of San Francisco to rebuild afterward. We have three task forces hard at work to produce policy papers that will help define how San Francisco should plan for and recover from the Big One. Our efforts are organized into three areas: hazard mitigation, emergency planning and rebuilding.
The Resilient City: Hazard mitigation
Led by Chris Poland of Degenkolb Engineers, SPUR’s Hazard Mitigation Task Force focuses on shoring up the seismic vulnerability of our existing buildings and new buildings, as well as infrastructure such as water, sewers, energy and transportation. In 2007, this group drafted an overarching paper defining how San Francisco can be made “resilient” — that is, able to contain the effects of earthquakes when they occur, carry out recovery activities in ways that minimize social disruption, and rebuild following earthquakes in ways that mitigate the effects of future earthquakes.
In 2008, SPUR will build on this overarching paper to complete white papers on existing buildings, new buildings and lifelines (water, power and transportation infrastructure), and to refine its recommendations for what would make San Francisco resilient. The result will be a series of well-defined policy recommendations to help guide decision-makers as they grapple with how to ensure that our city is prepared for a major disaster.
Emergency planning
Who is responsible for response in the hours and weeks following a major catastrophic event? What plans should we make now to ensure that our response is as fast and effective as possible? How do we handle medical emergencies at such a large scale? What should we be doing to support community-based response efforts? SPUR’s Emergency Planning Task Force has been digging deeply into all these questions, thanks to the work of SPUR Board Member Dick Morten.
Rebuilding
SPUR’s Rebuilding Task Force — led by SPUR Board Member Jacinta McCann — continued to tackle the thorny questions around how we should rebuild our city and region following a major earthquake. This year we hosted two major rebuilding charrettes: one on transportation planning and one on affordable housing. The transportation charrette focused on finding ways to create a transportation system that is resilient in the face of earthquakes. But it also went beyond the rebuilding of physical infrastructure to examine how the city and region can recover in ways that do not cause social or economic dislocation, or cause people to flee from the urban center to take up residence elsewhere. The affordable-housing charrette focused on the particular set of risks facing our affordable housing stock, including rent-controlled housing, public housing, permanently affordable subsidized housing and city master-leased housing. In 2008, we look forward to proposing recommendations that build on the findings from these charrettes, while tackling other thorny rebuilding questions around governmental authority and logistics planning.
Community Action Plan
for Seismic Safety
CAPSS, the Community Action Plan for Seismic Safety, is nearing completion. Conducted in three phases, this important study is charged with developing and implementing a work plan for reducing the earthquake risk to privately owned buildings in San Francisco. Begun in 2000, CAPSS was halted several years ago, before its Phase II report was completed and made public. In 2007, thanks to the efforts of several persistent and committed individuals including SPUR Board Member Debra Walker and SPUR member John Paxton, the CAPSS study contract is well into the approval process. We are eager for the CAPSS study to be completed, and look forward to its findings informing the public-policy debate around seismic safety.
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