Model Places Illustration

Housing

Our goal: Make housing affordable for everyone.

SPUR’s Five-Year Priorities:

• Reduce the cost of building housing to make it more affordable for everyone.

• Provide low- and middle-income residents with homes they can afford, and prevent displacement.

• Use housing as a tool for closing the racial wealth gap and leverage public investment to support wealth creation for low-income households.

 

​​ Read our policy agenda

 Monte Vista Gardens apartments in San José

SPUR Report

Housing the Region

Imagine a Bay Area where our greatest challenge, the scarcity and expense of housing, has been solved. This may sound like an impossible dream, but it isn’t. Within the next 50 years, we can live in an affordable region. But only if we make significant changes, starting right now. SPUR's series Housing the Region defines the Bay Area's housing crisis and put forth concrete steps to build a better, more affordable region.
Regional Strategy Illustration

SPUR Report

A Civic Vision for Growth

The Bay Area is a place of incredible possibility, but it faces threats from some of the highest housing costs in the country, growing income inequality, long commutes between jobs and affordable homes, and increasing danger from climate change. If we continue with business as usual, the region can expect these challenges to continue to escalate. But what if the people of the Bay Area chose a different future?

SPUR Report

What It Will Really Take to Create an Affordable Bay Area

The San Francisco Bay Area’s lack of housing and limited affordability have significant ramifications for the people who currently live here, the people who once lived here but have been forced to move elsewhere and the people who used to be housed but now live on the street. These housing pressures are remaking the region’s diversity, culture, economy and environment.

Model Places Illustration

SPUR Report

Model Places

Over the next 50 years, the San Francisco Bay Area is expected to gain as many as 4 million people and 2 million jobs. In a region where a crushing housing shortage is already threatening quality of life, how can we welcome new residents and jobs without paving over green spaces or pushing out long-time community members?
Apartment Buildings

SPUR Report

Room for More

Our housing agenda for San José lays out 20 concrete steps the city can take to address the chronic housing shortage, ranging from fixing its planning process to finding more funding for affordable housing.
Apartment Construction

SPUR Report

8 Ways to Make San Francisco More Affordable

San Francisco is in the midst of an affordability crisis. Reversing the situation will require far-reaching changes to the city’s housing policies. But there are many things we can do at the local level to make San Francisco more affordable for the people who live here.
Homes in San Francisco

SPUR Report

A Housing Strategy for San Francisco

San Francisco’s unique culture is threatened by the high cost of housing. Unless we do something, the city will lose its artists, its progressive politics, its immigrants and its young people. This second edition of our Housing Strategy for San Francisco updates the policy reports that define SPUR's housing agenda.

Updates and Events


How to Make California’s Budget Surplus a Good Deal for the Climate

News /
California is dangerously behind on cutting carbon emissions, but this year’s budget surplus can be a weapon in the fight to address climate change, with Governor Newsom announcing plans to spend $37 billion over the next six years on climate resilience. Here are SPUR’s suggestions for how to focus those resources on eliminating fossil fuels in buildings, securing safe and abundant water, ending car dependence, improving transit, building affordable housing where we need it and more.

SPUR-Sponsored State Housing Bills Move Forward in Sacramento

News /
With the California State Legislature back from its spring recess, key SPUR-sponsored housing legislation is making its way through the Assembly Local Government and Housing and Community Development committees. We’re supporting bills to prohibit minimum parking requirements for new buildings near transit, allow faster permitting of shelters for unhoused people, make development fees more transparent and more.

SPUR Joins More Than 20 Organizations to Oppose SB 1410

Advocacy Letter
SB 1410 would mandate the revision of the Vehicle Miles Traveled (VMT) based methodology to analyze transportation impacts under the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) that was carefully developed over many years pursuant to SB 743 (2013).

Proposed Ballot Measure Takes Aim at San Francisco’s Housing Shortage

News /
One of the root causes of San Francisco’s high housing costs is the city’s ongoing failure to build enough housing, a problem that’s been compounding for decades. A measure that SPUR and others are proposing for San Francisco’s November ballot would take two approaches to building more affordable housing: streamlining the permitting process and deepening the bench of construction workers.