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Bus rapid transit (BRT) projects can be transformative, as we have learned from cities like Cleveland in the U.S. and global examples like Mexico City. But making space on streets for travel modes other than the car is a challenge for cities and transit operators around the world. The Bay Area has five BRT projects in development today, and each has met with difficulty and delays.

Last month one of these projects, the Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority’s Santa Clara/Alum Rock line, made the move from planning stages to design and construction. This 7.2-mile route through downtown San Jose will provide high-frequency bus service (every 10 minutes) and connect two major transit hubs — Diridon Station and Eastridge Mall. This line will converge with the Stevens Creek and El Camino BRT lines in Downtown San Jose. When these three BRT lines are combined with local service, an estimated 84,000 daily bus riders are expected to travel this corridor in 2030 (compared with 31,000 in 2008).
 

Planned Bus Rapid Transit Projects in the South Bay
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VTA’s planned bus rapid transit projects. The Santa Clara/Alum Rock BRT line is shown in red. This corridor currently has some of the highest bus ridership in the region. Image courtesy VTA

BRT expands a transit network in places where there’s a demand for fast and frequent transit service — but where rail might not be justified. It can represent a big enough infrastructure improvement to support new development and more livable communities. In Cleveland, development of the Euclid Avenue Healthline BRT has led to $4.3 billion dollars in spin-off investments and more than 13.5 million square feet of new development.

What makes BRT tricky is in the details of integrating it on existing streets. Where will stations be located? How will giving a lane to BRT impact auto traffic and parking? How will changes to the streetscape affect local businesses? Particularly in commercial districts and downtowns, there can be many stakeholders — and many negotiations about how to allocate streets and sidewalks. For the Santa Clara/Alum Rock project, SPUR worked with all the parties involved to try to maintain BRT best practices while also mitigating community concerns. The issues we grappled with illustrate what makes BRT a challenge to implement:

1. WIN: There will be a BRT station in front of San Jose City Hall — not a block away. SPUR supported locating the City Hall BRT station directly in front of City Hall (between 5th and 6th streets), rather than one block east, as the city initially preferred due to security concerns. We argued that locating in front of City Hall would save a large amount of money (the original location would have required property acquisition costing hundreds of thousands of dollars), activate City Hall’s plaza and better serve major destinations – City Hall and San Jose State University. Additionally, the City Hall station represents an important opportunity for local government to lead by example and embrace BRT at its front door.

2. WIN: The downtown San Jose station has the right design for its location.Initially, the downtown station (on Santa Clara Street, between 1st and 2nd streets) borrowed its design from other BRT stations in suburban locations. A BRT stop on the median of a busy suburban boulevard needs heavy design elements to make patrons feel safe. But a downtown station needs the opposite — light elements that don’t clutter the sidewalk or block pedestrian access. Based on SPUR’s suggested refinements, city and VTA staff and their consultants made considerable modifications, creating a station we believe will integrate much better with the downtown streetscape. Changes such as the size and placement of awnings and benches go a long way toward improving aesthetics, pedestrian flow on the sidewalk and patron comfort while waiting for transit.
 

The revised downtown San Jose BRT station design changed the size and placement of street furniture to help it integrate with the sidewalk. For example, benches were turned sideways so that transit patrons would not sit with their backs to the sidewalk. Image courtesy VTA.
 

3. OUTCOME UNCLEAR: The current service design does not prevent BRT buses from getting delayed behind autos. Numerous changes in the design of the downtown BRT service have been considered over the past year. VTA’s original plan would have keep BRT buses in mixed-flow traffic lanes with other vehicles. This design provided sidewalk bulb outs for safe and efficient bus loading and avoided conflicts between autos turning right or left across bus traffic. But it also would have required cars to wait or move around loading buses, so City of San Jose staff and the San Jose Downtown Association asked VTA to modify the design. The revised design attempts to accommodate four lanes of autos and requires buses to move in and out of mixed-flow traffic to load and unload in the curbside lane.

Since this design would delay buses, potentially taking the “rapid” out of bus rapid transit, SPUR advocated for VTA to study dedicated bus-only lanes throughout the downtown. VTA found that dedicated lanes would significantly improve bus travel times, but the city — facing concerns from downtown business interests about slowing travel for cars — opposed the idea. When a coalition of organizations including SPUR, TransForm, Silicon Valley Leadership Group, Greenbelt Alliance and Working Partnerships voiced concern, VTA developed “transition lanes,” which would put a dedicated space before and after each stop to help buses move in and out of mixed-flow traffic faster.

Downtown interests have now advocated against transition lanes in order to retain the 10 spaces of on-street parking that would be lost — a position SPUR firmly disagrees with. The current design does include transition lanes, but because they are simply painted on the ground, they have remained up for debate by the VTA’s board. The timing of transition lane implementation, along with whether to allow left or right turns across bus traffic, has now been left to a VTA advisory board. We have not yet solved the problem of car traffic delaying rapid buses in Downtown San Jose.
 

Santa Clara BRT Proposed Station Layout
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The most recent service design for the downtown BRT station. The blue areas are “transition lanes,” space reserved for buses to pull in and out of traffic. Green areas are parking and yellow represents loading zones. Local businesses have opposed transition lanes due to the loss of 10 parking spaces downtown. Image courtesy VTA
 

What Did We Learn?

VTA and the City of San Jose deserve much recognition for moving the Santa Clara/Alum RockBRT project forward, but their success came at a cost to the BRT service. Just 1.9 of the Santa Clara/Alum Rock project’s 7.2 miles will be separated from autos on dedicated lanes. According to the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy’s BRT Scorecard, the Santa Clara/Alum Rockproject would be called “basic” BRT. As we move other Bay Area BRT projects forward, we can aspire to bronze, silver or gold rankings by including dedicated lanes and adding rider amenities rather than removing them.

BRT decisions will continue to be made across the region in the months ahead. VTA is now looking at seven possible alignments for the 17.3-mile El Camino BRT route, which will serve the cities of San Jose, Santa Clara, Sunnyvale, Mountain View, Los Altos and Palo Alto. The alignments being studied include a dedicated lane for BRT throughout, which VTA is studying despite opposition from leaders in many of those cities. In San Francisco, after many years of negotiations with stakeholders, the San Francisco County Transportation Authority is seeking to certify an environmental impact report for BRT on Van Ness Boulevard in July. This project is being proposed as “fully featured BRT,” which includes dedicated lanes for BRT and pedestrian improvements along Van Ness. As they move ahead, these projects will need support from many sources to retain their defining features.

Thanks to special buses and branding, transit signal priority and rapid boarding, the Santa Clara/Alum Rockproject will likely provide many of the benefits of BRT. And there will be many opportunities to create higher standard BRT service by adding quality pedestrian and bike facilities, clear wayfinding, real-time travel information and supportive parking policies. But when we choose not to give BRT riders priority on the street, we set BRT up to fail in its potential as “rapid” transit.

BRT has proven to be a test of our best policy intentions. The City of San Jose’s General Plan boldly defined a policy of reducing driving alone from 80 to 40 percent of all commutes by 2040. This is a worthy and ambitious goal, but to get there we must give BRT projects the support they need to succeed.

Learn about Mexico City’s BRT at our June 27 forum in San Jose >>

Attend Santa Clara/Alum Rock BRT station design meetings >>

Learn more about VTA BRT projects >>

Learn more about San Francisco BRT projects >>

SPUR has written several times about the development of Plan Bay Area since the planning process was kicked off a few years ago. Last month, the draft of the plan was finally released. What are the highlights in this 158-page plan and the accompanying 1,300-page environmental impact report? This post provides a summary of the Plan Bay Area draft and some of its key points. Keep an eye on the news feed at spur.org in the coming weeks for our official comment letter on the plan and what we think could be done to make it even stronger.

Update: SPUR's comment letter is now published >>

Recap: What Is Plan Bay Area, and Why Is It Important?

Plan Bay Area is a regional statement and projection about what the Bay Area could look like in 2040. Over the next 30 years, the Bay Area is projected to add 2.148 million new residents and 1.12 million new jobs. The planning questions inherent in Plan Bay Area are: Where will these new residents live? Where will they work? How will they get around? What percentage will live in apartments? What percentage will work in dense transit-oriented job centers? Accommodating this growth in a more sustainable way is at the heart of Plan Bay Area.

The emphasis on sustainability is a requirement under Senate Bill 375, California’s 2008 Climate Protection Act, which required that regions in California produce a Sustainable Communities Strategy (ours is Plan Bay Area). These strategies are intended to do the following:

1.    Identify where all of the region’s future population — at all income levels — will work and live over the next 25 years.

2.    Set forth a forecasted development pattern, know as the “preferred scenario.”

3.    Accommodate the future growth in a way that reduces per capita greenhouse gas emissions. The Bay Area is tasked with reducing per capita emissions by 7 percent in 2020 and 15 percent in 2035.

4.    Describe a transportation investment strategy and transportation network that supports the regional land use pattern and reduces per capita greenhouse gas emissions.

Plan Bay Area formally combines two existing regional planning processes, the Regional Transportation Plan and the Regional Housing Needs Allocation. The goal is to better link regional transportation planning and funding with a projection for future land use. The Regional Transportation Plan (RTP) is a multi-decade statement of the region’s likely transportation spending projects and needs, produced every four years. This year’s RTP identifies $289 billion of likely funding over the life of the plan. The Regional Housing Needs Allocation (RHNA) identifies the number of market rate and affordable housing units that each jurisdiction in the region is required to plan for over the upcoming seven years. The RHNA will be updated several times during the life of Plan Bay Area.

Plan Bay Area is the product of two regional agencies:

·      The Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC), the regional transportation funding agency for the Bay Area and the agency that historically produced the RTP.

·      The Association of Bay Area Governments (ABAG), the council of governments responsible for growth projections and housing allocations and the agency responsible for RHNA.

Plan Bay Area is important because it seeks to describe a future Bay Area where the average person produces fewer greenhouse gas emissions from driving and where we plan for enough housing for the region’s expected growth. Importantly, it must accomplish those two goals in a way that reduces per capita emissions. Managing these important goals is intended to change the way existing regional agencies go about their planning work and lead to a more holistic approach to transportation planning. Once the plan is adopted, future housing and mixed-use projects that are consistent with the adopted plan will have a more streamlined approval process under the California Environmental Quality Act.
 

What Plan Bay Area Isn’t

An important caveat about the plan’s powers: Though it is regional in scope, Plan Bay Area does nothing to change local land use decisions or powers. ABAG and MTC have no direct power to decide where future development will actually occur or what natural lands will be preserved.

Plan Bay Area is perhaps misnamed since it is not a “plan” in the traditional sense of describing specific zoning changes at a neighborhood scale. Instead, the plan is more of a statement about growth that local governments can look to when making land use and development decisions. The plan has slightly more direct power to affect travel patterns because it prioritizes transportation investments such as transit projects and policy suggestions, including increased bridge tolls and a potential driving fee based on miles traveled.

What Are Highlights of the Draft Plan?

The Plan Bay Area draft includes performance targets, long-range demographic and economic forecasts, and investment strategies for everything from road maintenance to climate projection programs, such as a regional electric vehicle charger network.

What are the most significant elements of the plan? Let’s take a closer look at how the draft seeks to shape and reshape the region’s land use patterns and transportation network.
 

Land Use: Almost no greenfield development

A major highlight of the Plan Bay Area draft is that it accommodates virtually all new development within the existing urbanized footprint of the Bay Area. In other words, it projects a region that does not sprawl further. It assumes continued protection of agricultural lands and enforcement of existing urban growth boundaries.

Where will all of the new growth happen? The Plan Bay Area draft directs growth first and foremost to the jurisdictions that have expressed a willingness to accommodate new housing and employment centers. In recent years, some local governments have worked with MTC and ABAG to identify and establish priority development areas, or PDAs, in their jurisdictions that will accommodate infill housing development and employment centers. The plan projects that PDAs will accommodate 80 percent of housing growth and 66 percent of job growth.

The central cities also become a major recipient of growth under the plan. Nearly 40 percent of new jobs will be accommodated in San Francisco (190,740 new jobs), San Jose (146,680 new jobs) and Oakland (85,240 new jobs) between 2010 and 2040. Two-thirds of housing would locate in just 15 of the more than 100 cities in the region.
 

The draft of Plan Bay Area would direct two-thirds of the growth in housing between 2010 and 2040 to 15 cities in the region. Source: Draft Plan Bay Area, March 2013. Pg. 11.
 

Transportation: Almost all funds for maintenance, not expansion

Plan Bay Area identifies $289 billion in available funds for transportation projects over the next three decades and prioritizes how they should be spent. More than half of the total funding (53 percent) comes from local sources, like sales taxes, that are often already dedicated to specific investments. An additional 32 percent come from state and federal sources. MTC directly controls the remaining 15 percent of the funding. However, the agency also has significant influence on how the federal and state funds are directed because it serves as a gatekeeper of sorts for directing funds to regional transportation projects.

How would the draft of Plan Bay Area spend this $289 billion? By adopting a “fix it first” policy, MTC is dedicating the vast majority of funding (86 percent) to the maintenance and improvement of the region’s existing transportation system.  While the Bay Area already devotes more of its funding to maintenance than other regions in California, this is an increase from about 80 percent in prior plans.

Of the $289 billion in funding, $232 billion is already committed to existing projects. This leaves $57 billion in so-called discretionary funds that can go to one of many projects based on future policy decisions and criteria. For example, the draft plan also includes $14 billion in the new One Bay Area Grant program, which will provide flexible funding for transportation infrastructure largely to support growth in the PDAs. The grants are intended to assist jurisdictions to plan for new transit-oriented housing projects, and also to invest in improvements to infrastructure necessary to support infill development, such as new bicycle lanes and more pedestrian-friendly sidewalks.

Overall, 62 percent of the plan’s funding is devoted to transit, with most of that going to maintenance and a small share for expansion. The plan identifies $114 billion for transit operations and argues that this level of investment will fully fund transit operating needs. It also identifies $30 billion for transit capital projects out of a total need of $47 billion (leaving a shortfall of $17 billion). And it includes a new $500 million “Transit Performance Initiative” whose goal is to support improvements on major transit corridors that will likely see future growth.

Some of the big transit projects in the plan include $8.3 billion for BART to San Jose, $4.2 billion for extending Caltrain to the Transbay Transit Center and $1.6 billion for Muni’s Central Subway. The plan also includes nearly $6.7 billion for expanding MTC’s express lanes (i.e., freeway carpool lanes) in more parts of the region and $1.5 billion for Valley Transit Authority express lanes in Santa Clara County. Other road projects include nearly $2.3 billion in freeway performance funds (such as metering lights) and $2 billion for the Presidio Parkway.
 

Source: Draft Plan Bay Area, March 2013. Pg. 13.
 

Policy: The plan acknowledges that some policy changes will be necessary for it to suceed

Without changes to the region’s policy structure, the plan will not likely be achieved. For example, Plan Bay Area assumes a continuation of the same level of investment that took place under California’s redevelopment program. But with redevelopment agencies shuttered last year, there is no such funding mechanism in place today.

Plan Bay Area identifies some of the initial policy projections worth considering. Many of these are ideas SPUR has advocated:

-       Reduce the fiscalization of land use (by exploring tools like tax-base sharing).

-       Establish a replacement for redevelopment.

-       Support lowering the threshold for local transportation sales tax measures from two-thirds to 55 percent.

-       Implement some form of road pricing, both through charging for single occupant vehicles to drive in carpool lanes and establishing a vehicle miles traveled (VMT) fee, where drivers would pay an annual fee based on how many miles they drove that year.
 

What Are the Alternatives to the Plan, and How Do They Differ?

If you’ve been following Plan Bay Area, you may have heard about the alternatives to the plan — variations on the draft version that put forward policies designed to achieve somewhat different objectives and outcomes. As part of the environmental review process for Plan Bay Area, ABAG and MTC review the environmental impact of their draft against the three alternative plans as well as a business-as-usual approach.

The Plan Bay Area draft provides a summary of the differences between the alternative plans (pg. 114):

In addition to the “preferred scenario” described in the Plan Bay Area document and a control scenario of adopting no plan at all, there are three other scenarios tested:

-       The Transit Priority Focus alternative, which focuses more growth in areas with higher densities and existing transit.

-       The Enhanced Network of Communities alternative, which projects a more dispersed land use pattern and higher population, housing and employment totals.

-       The Environment, Equity and Jobs alternative, which focuses more development and low-income housing growth in jobs-rich communities near transit that are often located farther away from the urban core.
 

Some of the key policy variables tested in the different alternatives are:

-       Instituting a development fee in areas with high VMT rates and using proceeds to invest in growth in lower VMT areas

-       Establishing higher tolls for peak traffic times on the Bay Bridge

-       Changing funding for transit

-       Deciding whether or not to build new carpool lanes

-       Increasing the projection for total housing production (which would result in higher overall job growth

On most measures examined in the EIR, the differences between the draft plan and the various alternatives are fairly slight. All four plans are projected to reduce per capita carbon dioxide emissions from cars and trucks, house the region’s projected population growth and increase the gross regional product. These often-minor differences in performance make sense, as all four plans overlap a great deal in their proposed policies for land use and transportation investments. The great challenge in weighing the merits of the draft plan against the alternatives comes in making sense of the impact of multiple, sometimes overlapping, policies aimed at achieving the same general goals.
 

What Happens Next?

Now that the draft is out, the public has an opportunity to provide comments in response to both the Plan Bay Area draft and the EIR. Public hearings on the draft plan are underway, with one scheduled in each of the Bay Area’s nine counties. Public comments can also be submitted by email. The comment period ends May 16, and final adoption of the plan is schedule for this summer.

SPUR will respond in detail to the Plan Bay Area draft in a comment letter to MTC and ABAG. Keep an eye on the newsfeed at spur.org for our full analysis.

Update: read our comment letter to MTC and ABAG >>

After a number of delays, the wheels are finally turning on a bike-sharing program for the Bay Area. Earlier this month, the Bay Area Air Quality Management District (BAAQMD) signed a contract with Alta Bike Share, which runs successful programs in Washington, D.C., and Boston. A Bay Area pilot program will launch this summer for two years of testing with 700 bikes at 70 locations from San Jose to San Francisco.

Bike sharing allows anyone to rent a bicycle from a self-serve kiosk and drop it off at another location, providing guaranteed bike access without worries about damage, theft or maintenance. Programs have been geared toward tourists in cities like Paris, but they also have great potential to help locals solve the “last mile” problem — the difficulty of getting commuters from a transit hub to their final destination.

The Bay Area’s pilot will be the first regional program in the country — a detail that created complications and delayed the program, originally expected to begin in 2012. Structured around Caltrain, it will put an estimated 50 locations in downtown San Francisco and about two dozen more near Caltrain stations in Redwood City, Palo Alto, Mountain View and San Jose. BAAQMD is seeking sponsorships to expand the system. Meanwhile, SF Supervisor Scott Wiener is lobbying to extend the dowtown San Francisco part of the pilot across the city. A successful bikesharing program requires a strong business model and considers: close proximity to increased population and job densities; an optimal distribution of bikes (ideally around 50 percent bikes to 50 percent open docks); locations no more than one-half mile apart; and affordable and strategic pricing that promotes ridership.

Locating the bike sharing stations around Caltrain has the potential to change the state of commuting in the Bay Area. As we noted in our report The Urban Future of Work, 80 percent of office buildings in the Bay Area are within three miles of regional transit, but only 11 percent of commuters take transit to work. The option to add a short bike ride to the end of a trip could turn rail commuting into a viable option for a much greater number of people. Though it’s focused on Caltrain stations, the program’s concentration of downtown SF locations could also make it useful to BART riders, who are not yet allowed to bring bicycles on trains during rush hour. We look forward to testing the possibilities this summer.

Learn more about the pilot program >>

How do we create the kinds of compact, walkable environments that can have a real impact on car use and carbon emissions? SPUR San Jose’s Urban Design Task Force is working to foster well-designed new development that will support the city’s 2040 General Plan goals of a more walkable, livable and transit-friendly built environment. To understand the current state of development practice, we spent a recent Saturday visiting projects up and down the peninsula, focusing on large, multi-building developments that aim to introduce a more urban land use pattern. Each project we saw has its strengths and weaknesses, and each holds lessons for San Jose — and all growing cities — about the challenges of retrofitting suburbia into more sustainable communities.

See site plans for the projects on the tour >>
 

Stop 1:  Mission Bay, San Francisco

Developer: Catellus, Alexandria
6,000 residential units, 1,800+ affordable
43-acre, 2.3 million sf UCSF campus
280,000 sf retail
4.4 million sf office/biotech
49 acres of public parks and open space

The use of redevelopment tools (which California eliminated last year) and the location of UCSF's biomedical research campus were key elements driving development at Mission Bay, a new San Francisco neighborhood on the former Southern Pacific railyards. The campus has successfully attracted a cluster of private biotech firms, a boon to the city’s economy and to the economics of Mission Bay land.

The development plan for the site stipulated not only uses and densities, but also the location, design, and phasing of public realm improvements like parks, plazas and promenades. These standards mean that developers’ obligations are clear to everyone and the design framework is non-negotiable. Parks and open space must be built out before private buildings, and parking must be placed away from street fronts. One of the great successes of Mission Bay is the integration of new construction with the public realm, which is not San Francisco's strong suit in general. The promenade along Mission Creek Channel is an under-appreciated gem, offering a model of truly integrated public space and private development.   

Stop 2: Bay Meadows, San Mateo

Phase 1
Developer: Stockbridge Capital
87-acre former stable area and practice track
735 residential units
272,000 sf office and retail, including a Whole Foods Grocery
Kaiser Medical Center

Phase 2 (under construction)
Developer: Wilson Meany
1,250,000 sf office
1,250 residential units
150,000 sf retail
15 acres of public parks

Bay Meadows, the site of a former racetrack adjacent to the Hillsdale Caltrain station in San Mateo, has recently begun construction on the second phase of its conversion to a mixed-use, transit-oriented neighborhood. Our visit to the first phase, completed by Stockbridge in 2011, revealed some of the key ingredients of good urban design. Office, retail, health care and housing are in close proximity, organized around a clear framework of streets, pedestrian pathways, parks and plazas. This phase is some distance from Caltrain, making it more internally oriented than transit oriented, but it represents a significant improvement over typical suburban development projects.

At phase 2, Wilson Meany has recently initiated construction on two parcels of an ambitious and considerably more urban project, which clusters office space, housing, retail, and public parks around the Caltrain Station. Office uses are nearest the station, flanked by a retail street that connects to several types of housing, at densities that increase as they get closer the station. An independent school holds one major site and the developer has opted to pay for the largest park up front, rather than await the city process.

Although no redevelopment powers were used at Bay Meadows, the project benefited from the large single parcel of land and from a tightly worded specific plan and development agreement with the city of San Mateo, including schematic-level architectural designs. This creates an unusual degree of clarity and certainty, drawing recession-weary builders to participate. As the master developer, Wilson Meany is the steward of this more urban vision, and the firm is the first line of review for any changes.

Stop 3: Sunnyvale Town Center, Sunnyvale

In Downtown Sunnyvale, land around the Caltrain station is in the process of redevelopment from a midcentury auto-oriented retail center into a dense mix of office, housing, and urban retail. The Sunnyvale Town Center project has been stalled for about two years in litigation resulting from the bankruptcy of the original developers after the 2008 economic collapse. With elements of the project half built, it awaits resolution by the courts before a new developer can step in and complete it.

In spite of its challenges, the City of Sunnyvale has stuck to its vision and implemented those portions that could move forward. A public plaza with an underground garage connects Caltrain to office buildings that meet the street. Both Apple and Nokia have occupied buildings recently, proving that tech has a life beyond the sealed suburban campus. Significant multifamily housing projects are under construction. A Target store that predates the lawsuit sits above ground-floor parking that is lined with small retail bays, awaiting future tenants and suggesting a compelling approach to the challenges of urban big-box retail. And Murphy Avenue — a historic block of small-scale retail — thrives, hosting a farmer’s market among the half-built hulks of a future held hostage by legal wrangling.

Stop 4: Brocade /@First, San Jose

Developer: Hunter-Storm
36.3 acres
73,000 sf shopping center
170-room hotel
880,000 sf tech office (Brocade HQ)

The @First project combines the headquarters of Brocade Networks with a hotel, Target store and additional retail. The 36-acre site lies on North First Street in a relatively suburban context. Market forces in North San Jose have picked up sufficiently to support high quality multistory commercial buildings, structured parking, and hotel towers, on the same site as significant retail – many of the ingredients of good urban places.

Horizontal mixed-use projects (in which complementary land uses are placed in different buildings) like Brocade are a key opportunity to provide walkable amenities in less dense settings where vertical mixture (where uses are mixed within a single building) remains challenging. But doing so requires a strong site-planning framework that integrates the different elements into one cohesive and accessible place. At Brocade, the constraints of securing the deal’s components — the sight lines and surface parking required by retailers, the security needs of a tech headquarters — predominate. While pedestrian walkways exist, the site plan is organized around auto access. Buildings line the streets, but they open to an interior parking lot, not to the sidewalk. Having proven that North San Jose’s market can support the ingredients of good urban places, the next step is to ensure that strong site planning can organize them into walkable and transit-supportive environments.

Stop 5: Crescent Village, San Jose

Developer: Irvine
1,750 rental apartments
10,000 sf retail
5-acre public park

Crescent Village is a multi-building rental project that will eventually include 1,750 units in wood buildings above parking podiums. Its developer, the Irvine Company, owns and manages it housing, which gives them a greater incentive to invest in placemaking and amenities. The buildings frame a five-acre park; concentrated around it are ground-floor retail and “placeholder” uses (like game rooms and a leasing office) that could eventually become leasable. Parking is in ground-level podiums, which are carefully placed to limit their impact.

The project’s architecture has the uniformity one might expect of this kind of instant neighborhood, but the construction quality is high and building details support the pedestrian experience. The biggest urban design challenge here is the inward orientation. Although the park is public, it feels like it belongs to the project, and the buildings connect more successfully to the village’s interior streets than to the surrounding streets of the neighborhood. In future projects, a portion of the open space fees might be well spent on better pedestrian connections to transit and other nearby amenities.

Stop 6: Cahill Park, San Jose

Developer: Avalon, Brooks St

Our final stop was Cahill Park, a residential neighborhood just behind San Jose’s Diridon Station combining streetfront retail, adaptive reuse of a former cannery, and housing of several types around a park that connects to the train station.

Of interest here is the way the development projects respond to the adjacent neighborhood while increasing overall densities. An excellent retail frontage meets the Alameda — a historic commercial street — separated by a narrow band of parking from four stories of housing above a parking podium. One edge of this project includes bungalows that back onto the podium, providing a familiar face to the neighborhood, while the other edge faces six stories of housing in a repurposed cannery. These buildings, plus two townhouse projects, are organized around a small park. Although the park is oddly shaped and a bit featureless, it is redeemed by being tightly enclosed by the surrounding buildings, creating an “urban room” that connects directly to the adjacent Caltrain station. One might wish for higher densities at this location (especially given that it will eventually be a high-speed rail stop), but overall, Cahill Park is a supremely livable setting with a lot to teach us.

See site plans for the projects >>
See more photos of the tour >>
 

Many thanks to our generous hosts:
Kelley Kahn, former project director, Office of Mayor Edwin Lee, City of San Francisco
Janice Thacher, partner, Wilson Meany
Hanson Hom, community development director, City of Sunnyvale
Joe Horwedel, director of Planning, Building,and Code Enforcement, City of San Jose
Kim Walesh, chief strategist, City of San Jose

The Bay Area economy has rebounded from the recession. Yet major regional challenges threaten our continued prosperity. These topics were a major focus at the 2013 State of Silicon Valley, the annual event where Silicon Valley and Bay Area leaders gather to discuss the state of our region’s economy. This year the conference organizers, Joint Venture Silicon Valley and the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, invited SPUR to write a special analysis about regional governance for presentation at the conference and inclusion in the event’s flagship publication, the Silicon Valley Index.

In the resulting piece, Strengthening the Bay Area’s Regional Governance, SPUR Regional Planning Director Egon Terplan made the case that some of the biggest threats to the Bay Area’s long-term economic competitiveness are challenges best addressed through better regional governance.

Regional decisions are responsible for much of what makes the Bay Area such a great place to live and work, including our large areas of open space and the transit infrastructure that links our cities and suburbs. Regional agencies like BART, the Golden Gate National Recreation Area and the Bay Conservation and Development Commission, which SPUR played a major role in establishing, were set up to manage these assets in perpetuity. Yet our regional agencies have changed little since the 1970s, and they are increasingly inadequate to address the issues shaping the Bay Area’s future.

Currently, our regional agencies are single-purpose entities — they lack the power to integrate land use planning, transportation, natural resource protection and climate change adaptation. Cities working to address these issues on their own often inadvertently exacerbate them in another part of the region, thwarting overall regional competitiveness.

SPUR’s report for the Silicon Valley Index focuses on five major regional issues in need of better planning and coordination:

1. Job sprawl. As the regional grows, jobs are being added in a decentralized pattern with few connections to reliable transit. This growth pattern is resulting in unsustainable commutes and increased levels of greenhouse gas emissions. In our thinking about The Future of Work, SPUR has made the case that locating jobs closer to transit — and closer to one another — will be key to the Bay Area’s long-term economic growth.

2. The need for more overall housing production. Local jurisdictions have a greater incentive to add jobs than housing. This dynamic has resulted in a jobs-housing imbalance as well as high housing prices in much of the region. SPUR has encouraged regional agencies to increase regional housing growth totals in their planning scenarios.

3. Competition between cities for tax revenues. The winner-take-all approach to local tax revenues results in fiscal and service disparity among cities. It also undermines regional cooperation and can lead to inefficient land use outcomes. SPUR has explored the promise of regional tax sharing. We've also looked at shifting to a system of more green taxes and fees as possible solutions to this regional problem.

4. The need for better coordination of regional transit services. The Bay Area has a huge transit system, but it is managed by 27 separate and poorly coordinated agencies. This fragmentation results in challenges for users and operators alike. SPUR has many recommendations for saving regional transit — including contemplating a possible merging of BART and Caltrain — and strategies for better funding and governing regional rail.

5. The need to prepare for sea level rise. Climate change is a problem that threatens every jurisdiction in the Bay Area. It demands a coordinated response, yet no regional agency exists with the mandate or the tools to direct an adaptation strategy. SPUR has done some of the leading thinking around how the Bay Area’s response to sea level rise could be better.

Where to begin? At the conference, we highlighted a few of these items for immediate action, including regional transit coordination and pilot tests for tax sharing.

Over the long term, the special analysis argues, we have three broad options for reforming regional governance:

1. Strengthen existing agencies by giving them more power.

2. Establish one or more new regional entities with new powers to respond to specific problems.

3. Move toward a multipurpose regional agency like those in Portland, Oregon, and in Minnesota's Twin Cities.

To achieve any of these options will require convincing Bay Area residents and politicians to recognize our linked fates.

The truth is that in today’s economy, the region is the scale where we compete globally.  We face increasing competition from places that act and work regionally, such as Singapore, Shanghai and Vancouver. Failing to strengthen our own ability to act in concert as a region means risking the Bay Area’s economic standing globally.

Our needs are more interconnected now than ever. Our governance should reflect that.

Download the full index and special analysis >>

Read the special analysis online >>

Read ABC News coverage >>

Read coverage from The Mercury News >>

Read coverage from Palo Alto Online >>

Southern Santa Clara County used to have a widespread and thriving agricultural sector, helping the area earn the name “Valley of the Heart’s Delight.”  Today, much of that famed farmland has been replaced with homes and offices. One exception is the Coyote Valley, a narrow, 5-mile-long area between southern San Jose and Morgan Hill.  Before the recent economic downturn, much of Coyote Valley was slated for development, and intense land speculation had driven up property prices.  After 2008, however, local open-space and agriculture advocates saw a sharp drop in the development pressure and wondered whether it would be economically feasible for Coyote Valley to retain its agricultural character. 

That question led Sustainable Agriculture Education (SAGE) to conduct an in-depth feasibility study over the past eighteen months. In its report, Coyote Valley: Sustaining Agriculture and Conservation, SAGE concludes that an agricultural economy is feasible for the area if significant investments in land, infrastructure and policy are made in the next 25 years. The report outlines a three-phase strategy that would split a $50 million investment between: 1) agricultural land preservation, mainly through purchasing conservation easements on existing farms; 2) infrastructure, including updating and expanding irrigation in the valley; and 3) program coordination and marketing. The report envisions that a new entity, the Coyote Valley Agricultural Enterprise and Conservation Program, would work to implement the strategy using funds from both public and private sources. 

In addition to presenting an ambitious vision, the study is notable for recommending an agricultural preservation strategy that anticipates integrating farming into a “mosaic” of other land uses. Rather than propose the creation of one large contiguous block of farmland, the study recommends the preservation of at least 50 percent of the existing farmland throughout the north, middle and southern sections of Coyote Valley, interspersed with clusters of residential and commercial development. The study also presents an incredibly detailed assessment of current opportunities and challenges such as: vast acreage in the valley currently owned by developers who currently have little interest in leasing long-term to farmers; the potential to increase the value of production by 300 percent by changing what crops are planted; and initial indications that policy and overall trends in the real estate market are easing development pressure in the area. 

SAGE’s report on the Coyote Valley is a fantastic case study of urban-edge agriculture. It shows that the opportunity to retain and expand a self-sustaining agricultural economy that provides food and livelihoods in Southern Santa Clara still exists. But the report also makes clear that, as in many parts of the Bay Area, the opportunity will slip away unless policymakers, farmers and food-system advocates focus their energy on shifting the Coyote Valley in a new direction.

Read the Coyote Valley study and supporting documents >>

The Fall 2012 issue of Content magazine highlights SPUR’s recent expansion to San Jose in a terrific profile of our San Jose director, Leah Toeniskoetter. A passionate cyclist and former Peace Corps volunteer with a background in real estate development, Toeniskoetter is pleased with the work that's been accomplished over the past year and is excited for what's ahead. “There are 500,000 people coming to San Jose in the next several decades,” she explains. “SPUR is excited to think deeply about where they will live, work, shop and play.” The city's future, she says, is urban: “We want to live in a walkable, active place with viable alternatives to driving and the ability to live close to work, parks and our basic needs.”

Download a pdf of the article >>

Recent years have been filled with experts decrying the sorry state of public finance in California. And with good reason. Three California cities have filed for bankruptcy protection since June. Since 2008, local governments in California have shrunk by nearly 190,000 employees (11.2 percent) and property values over the same period declined statewide by 21.3 percent. Meanwhile, the state budget experienced consecutive annual budget deficits of $60 billion (2009-10), $19.3 billion (2010-11), $26.6 billion (2011-12) and $16.6 billion (2012-13).

What comes next?

The Institute for Government Studies at the University of California at Berkeley convened an impressive panel of experts last month to move that debate forward. Discussions covered more than the magnitude of the problem — although there was plenty to say about that. There was also talk about the factors contributing to the crisis and what we might be able to do about it.

While few disagreed about the overall state of finances in California, panelists spoke of a combination of factors that may have led the state deeper into recession:

·      Existing structural challenges have been exposed by the recession. The recession has revealedfundamental imbalances between receipts and expenditures, such as weaknesses in the financing of state and local pension plans and retiree healthcare obligations. These systems were designed to be sustained through continual growth but they had never before been tested by a downturn like the one we’ve recently experienced.

·      State actions to balance budgets may have intensified the impact on local governments. Steps taken by the governor and state legislature to stabilize state finances and limit the impacts of the economic downturn — such as the elimination of redevelopment agencies — may have compounded the impacts of the recession on local governments. The elimination of redevelopment agencies was projected to save the state up to $1.7 billion, but it has also left cities without financing for affordable housing or other redevelopment initiatives.

·      One-time solutions have been exhausted.With a sustained downturn, the collection of strategies used to weather a short-term recession have long since been used. What is left are much more painful discussions about service reductions, e.g. closure of state parks.

·      Competing traditions have left the state paralyzed.State and local governments in California have been constrained by competing traditions: an appetite for generous public services and a citizenry actively engaged in ballot-box planning. Proposition 13, the 1978 measure that capped property assessments, and Proposition 218, which requires voter-approval for new revenues, are significant barriers and have constrained the ability to generate revenues to sustain funding levels.

·      Irrational optimism is preventing necessary decisions. Worse than a “perfect storm” of economic factors is the weight of history in how California moves forward. Despite the depth of the recession and the impacts of state and local reductions, there is still an overwhelming belief that the state can grow out of this problem as it has in the past. Nowhere is that belief stronger than with the growing challenge of funding public employee pensions and retiree healthcare, with a projected shortfall of between $200 billion and $500 billion just for state pension funds, depending on the estimate. Unfunded retiree healthcare obligations add an additional $60 billion. There is little agreement about how to mitigate those challenges.

The pension issue is emblematic of the broader paralysis of the state. There is consensus on the existence of the problem, but no agreement whatsoever on just how bad it is or how it should be solved. In spite of critical funding constraints, there is no agreement over whether to raise additional revenue or to reduce benefits. Financial experts appear to agree that state and local pension systems need to revisit how pensions are calculated, but enacting changes for anyone but current employees — the bulk of the current unfunded liability — is an extremely difficult proposition. A few cities have attempted to tackle the task: San Francisco negotiated changes to its system, and both San Diego and San Jose passed reforms at the ballot; Los Angeles is still on the horizon. The pension reform proposal for the State of California, signed into law last month by Governor Brown, leaves the benefits of current employees untouched but requires them to share in the expense of increased benefit costs.

And these are exactly the types of challenges that have driven several California cities into bankruptcy — Mammoth Lakes, Stockton and San Bernardino in 2012 alone. The structural costs of labor, healthcare and pension benefits have in these cases eclipsed the ability of cities to provide core services. In some instances cities are closing recreation centers simply to retain public safety services. We have clearly arrived at a time when we must prioritize services and invest limited resources wisely.

California, both the state and to some extent its cities, is at a crossroads: Either we operate within the constraints of this “new normal” or we come to agreement on solutions that can be jointly sold to legislators and taxpayers. In the past, consistent growth and fleeting downturns have allowed California to in many ways paper over the major challenges and rely on one-time fixes to weather the occasional storm.

It’s clear that time is over.

Hear recordings of the complete panel sessions >>

In January 2010, San Jose passed an inclusionary housing law to help do three things: address the city’s affordable housing needs, meet the state’s requirement for regional fair share housing and promote economic integration. But now a successful legal suit has thrown the future of this law into question. To understand what’s at stake, this post takes a look at how the 2010 ordinance was designed to work and what the lawsuit could mean for San Jose and other California cities.

Before 2010, San Jose’s inclusionary housing policy applied only to redevelopment areas, but the 2010 ordinance expanded the requirements citywide. The ordinance applies to residential developments of 20 units or more and requires that 15 percent of units in for-sale housing developments be made available for purchase by income-restricted households at below market rates. Additionally, 9 percent of the dwelling units in rental developments must be priced for moderate-income households and 6 percent for very low income households. (“Moderate income” is defined as $53,000 for a 1-person household and $75,700 for a 4-person household, and “very low income” is $36,750 for a 1-person household and $52,500 for a 4-person household.)

The ordinance creates an incentive for developers to build the inclusionary units on-site, but it also provides them with other options to fulfill their affordable housing obligations. For example, developers can pay an in-lieu fee that helps to fund future affordable housing initiatives in the city, build affordable units at a separate location or dedicate land for future affordable housing developments. Additionally, the ordinance places deed restrictions to ensure that the inclusionary units remain affordable well into the future. In the event that an owner of an inclusionary unit were to sell the home to a buyer who does not meet the income requirements, the city would capture a portion of the appreciated value of the home. Those proceeds, similar to the developer in-lieu fee, would pay for future affordable housing.

The ordinance is meant to help San Jose reach its housing goal of providing more than 19,000 affordable housing units between 2007 and 2014, as determined by the Association of Bay Area Governments and in accordance with the state-required regional housing needs allocation (RHNA) process. The city had already implemented precedents for this concept in large-scale development plans, including the redevelopment of the former Hitachi industrial campus and North San Jose’s Specific Plan, where a portion of the new homes built would be affordable as a way of ensuring a diverse community.

San Jose’s inclusionary housing ordinance was slated to go into effect in January 2013, but following its adoption the California Building Industry Association (CBIA), with assistance from the BIA Bay Area, filed a lawsuit to overturn it. The plaintiffs argued that the city did not show proof that market rate housing adversely affected the community or created the need for affordable housing. Proving evidence of a relationship between the impacts of a development and the requirements put on the developer, called a “nexus,” has been established as a constitutional standard in previous land use lawsuits. In certain cases cities will undertake a nexus study to prove the relationship before proposing fees or requirements. However, it is very unusual for jurisdictions to do nexus studies to justify their inclusionary housing ordinances. Normally, cities can rely on the “police powers” afforded them under state and federal law in order to enact inclusionary housing laws for the purposes of regulating land use or protecting the health and well-being of their citizens. This is nothing new in California cities: The California Coalition for Rural Housing compiled a database that indexes 145 inclusionary policies in different jurisdictions statewide, nearly half of which are enacted in other Bay Area cities.

In May 2012, the lawsuit against San Jose’s inclusionary housing ordinance prevailed and Santa Clara County Superior Court overturned it. San Jose is in the process of appealing this decision, and the outcome could have implications for any California city that passed similar measures without a nexus study. 

Until the appeal is heard, no part of the law can be enforced, and San Jose cannot rely on its inclusionary ordinance to provide affordable housing. Meanwhile, it and other California cities can no longer rely on redevelopment funding that came from tax increment financing, 20 percent of which (and in San Jose’s case, up to 40 percent) was used to fund affordable housing. Since 1988, these funds have helped finance 175 developments in San Jose, providing 13,920 affordable units. The economic meltdown, coupled with these cuts to funding, has left the city significantly behind in meeting its RHNA goals for the 2007-2014 period. (These goals are mandated by state housing law as a way to quantify the need for housing within each city during specific planning periods,) And there is no new source of funds on the horizon.

Meanwhile, the need for housing that is affordable to the local workforce, across the spectrum of incomes in San Jose, remains as high as ever. Affordable housing developers are still trying to pursue projects in San Jose, and the city’s housing department plans on continuing to support affordable housing. Their goal is to provide funding for affordable housing units currently in the pipeline, despite limited funding.

SPUR believes it is important to increase thesupply of housing at all income levels; when designed and located well, housing can become a tool for strengthening neighborhoods and local economies. We also believe that one type of housing need not be built at the expense of another. Instead, we must work collaboratively to obtain the necessary financial resources and regulatory tools to build it all.We hope the city’s inclusionary housing ordinance will be reinstated, and that San Jose will be able to find new resources to help construct badly needed affordable housing.

Earlier 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 system that will travel between San Francisco and Los Angeles in 2 hours and 40 minutes (at 220 m.p.h.) and will operate without any ongoing subsidy.

There are four key changes in this updated business plan:

1. It lowers the cost of the high-speed rail system by $30 billion to $68.4 billion by adopting a “blended” approach. This focuses investment on upgrading existing regional and commuter rail systems, not building an entirely new statewide system. The blended approach is realistic and allows for the system to be built incrementally. In the 2011 business plan, the blended approach was estimated to cost $78 billion. It is now estimated to be $68.4 billion. The savings are primarily due to updated assumptions about inflation and faster construction time. This approach has greater political support in adjacent communities (namely on the Peninsula) and has successful precedents around the world, including France’s popular TGV.

2. While starting construction in the Central Valley, it includes early investments in the Bay Area and Los Angeles (the “bookends” of the system). This includes the decision to help fund the electrification of Caltrain with a $700 million statewide investment in addition to $800 million in local and regional funds to help electrify Caltrain by 2020. Electrifying Caltrain will speed service (since electric trains can stop and start faster than diesel ones) and will reduce emissions by 90 percent. The new business plan also includes investment in upgrading the rail systems in the Los Angeles area. Overall, $3.5 billion will go into the urban systems over the next eight years.

3. It proposes that the initial operating segment will connect from the Central Valley to Southern California.The 2011 business plan proposed that the initial construction section would run from Madera (south of Merced) to Bakersfield. This business plan assumes that the system will begin with passenger service from Merced to a station in the San Fernando Valley. To connect from the Central Valley to Southern California requires investment in building passenger rail tracks over the Tehachapi Mountains to connect Bakersfield and Palmdale. This business plan assumes that this segment will have sufficient ridership and revenue to exceed its cost and will be self-sustaining without need for operating subsidy.

4. It makes high-speed trains part of an integrated statewide transportation system in California, where each investment has immediate benefits to its respective region. While the initial construction and operating segments will be to the south, the California High-Speed Rail Authority is proposing improvements to the existing regional rail system between the Central Valley and the Bay Area, namely the Altamont Commuter Express from Stockton to San Jose and Amtrak’s San Joaquin line from the East Bay to Stockton or Sacramento via Contra Costa County.

While we commend Bay Area leaders and the California High-Speed Rail Authority for taking these important steps to move the project forward, SPUR remains concerned that high-speed rail’s initial operating segment runs from the Central Valley to Southern California and will not connect to the Bay Area. We are also concerned that there is not yet funding to extend Caltrain’s service from the current San Francisco station at 4th and King to the new Transbay Transit Center in downtown. This raises a few questions:

· When will be there be a one-seat ride from San Francisco to Los Angeles?

· If there is funding to upgrade the Altamont Commuter Express over the Altamont Pass, does this mean a rider from San Francisco would take Caltrain to San Jose and then ACE to Stockton before connecting to the trunk line to Los Angeles?

· Does this mean that we should rethink Dumbarton Rail as an electrified service that could bring upgrades and electrified ACE trains to meet up with Caltrain on the Peninsula?

· What will it take to fully fund high-speed service over the Pacheco Pass south of San Jose?

The new plan puts the onus on the Bay Area as a region — and SPUR as a civic voice — to find the money to both bring Caltrain and high-speed service to San Francisco’s key transit hub and connect that service to the initial high-speed operating segment in the Central Valley.

Despite our concerns about the initial focus on the connection to Southern California, we at SPUR (like the mayors of California’s major cities) remain strong supporters of high-speed rail. The blended approach takes a pragmatic tack — without sacrificing true high-speed service.

Redevelopment agencies across the state closed their doors on February 1, marking the end of an era for planning in California. SPUR has written previously about what the end of redevelopment means for the state. But how are the Bay Area’s central cities — San Francisco, Oakland and San Jose — dismantling their agencies? What’s going to happen to the on-going projects and existing assets held by redevelopment agencies? Is this the last word — or will we witness the creation of other planning tools to do some of the work that was previously done by redevelopment agencies?

San Francisco
San Francisco is, in many ways, the city least likely to be impacted by the end of redevelopment — and the one in the best position to develop tools and strategies to replace it. As both a city and a county, San Francisco will not need to send its redevelopment funding to a separate county government, where it would become one of many jurisdictions fighting for remaining funds. In contrast, Oakland is one of 14 cities in Alameda County (not including unincorporated Alameda County) and San Jose is one of 15 cities in Santa Clara County (not including unincorporated Santa Clara County). Despite this, San Francisco will not emerge unscathed.

San Francisco has developed three main priorities to guide its actions in the face of redevelopment’s dissolution: first, that the three large redevelopment projects (Mission Bay, Hunter’s Point and Transbay) that qualify as enforceable obligations under Assembly Bill 26 (the state law that dissolved redevelopment) continue uninterrupted; second, that the community development functions of redevelopment — including affordable housing production, workforce development programs, and neighborhood strengthening and investment initiatives — be protected; and third, that that programs that receive state or federal matching funds continue to move forward so that matching funding is not lost.

In late January, the city adopted a resolution that laid out the plan for meeting these priorities. The resolution took four steps:

1. It identified the city as the “successor agency” to the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency, meaning that the city itself will control the former assets of the redevelopment agency.
2. It transferred the redevelopment agency’s affordable housing funds to the Mayor’s Office of Housing and transferred all other assets to the City Administrator’s Office.
3. It required payment and performance on “enforceable obligations,” or approved redevelopment projects that will be allowed to go forward. These include Mission Bay, Hunters Point Shipyard, portions of Bayview Hunters Point and Transbay.
4. It created a new oversight board to oversee the management of these enforceable obligations.

In addition, the city also rescinded the Treasure Island Development Authority as a redevelopment agency. The city has opted to convert the Treasure Island project into an Infrastructure Financing District (IFD) as opposed to a Redevelopment Area. The IFD will create a source of tax increment financing to support bonds necessary to pay for some of the infrastructure costs. By doing this, the city clarified that Treasure Island is not subject to any of the post-redevelopment constraints imposed by A.B. 26.

The upshot for San Francisco is that some of its affordable housing funding and existing major redevelopment projects are well positioned to be protected. However, some of the other work of redevelopment not considered enforceable obligations — such as economic development and project development in areas such as Visitation Valley — will require more creative approaches to move forward.  

Additionally, the future of the redevelopment agency’s roughly 100 employees remains unclear.

Oakland
In Oakland, the loss of redevelopment will be devastating to the capacity of the city to develop underutilized properties. Projects like the Broadway Auto Row project and the funds to build a new stadium for the A’s could be substantially reduced or eliminated. In addition, Oakland will not be able to rely on tax increment financing to fund affordable housing; roughly 25 percent of redevelopment funding in Oakland were used to fund affordable housing.

The loss of redevelopment has also taken its toll on other aspects of Oakland’s government: Redevelopment funds are deeply intertwined into more than 160 city positions in 11 departments. Rather than deliver pink slips to those employees whose jobs were funded by redevelopment, city leaders instead proposed overhauling all city operations to more efficiently provide services while retaining some redevelopment staff to help wind down current projects. On January 31, the Oakland City Council approved an amended budget accounting for the $28 million gap from redevelopment funding. The city will eliminate 105 positions, resulting in 80 layoffs. Consolidations include combining the Office of Parks and Recreation and the Department of Human Services. Oakland will also move key administrative functions for several departments into a single Administrative Services Department, according to the city administrator. The Community and Economic Development Agency, which housed most of the city’s redevelopment activities, will be dissolved into four new offices: Planning and Neighborhood Preservation, Housing and Community Development, Economic and Workforce Development, and Neighborhood Investment. The City of Oakland has also identified itself as the successor agency and will prioritize projects like the Oakland Army Base that have enforceable obligations to move forward. The City administrator's office will manage the remaining assets from the elimination of redevelopment.  

San Jose
Established in 1956, the San Jose Redevelopment Agency (SJRA) invested billions of dollars in four program goals:

1. Creating jobs and expanding business through investments in projects such as Cisco’s campus in North San Jose and Adobe’s headquarters in the downtown,
2. Building public facilities such as the Repertory Theater and the 4th Street Parking Garage,
3. Developing and preserving affordable and market rate housing and
4. Strengthening neighborhoods through the Strong Neighborhoods Initiative and Neighborhood Business Districts.

The agency used the tax increment from its roughly 19,000 acres of designated redevelopment areas to borrow against and reinvest in other areas. In doing so in an arguably overly robust way, they became the state’s second largest redevelopment agency as measured by tax revenue, and the City of San Jose’s “go to” for funding and approval of almost all major projects in the last several decades.

The SJRA began planning for its own shuttering a few years ago when the state began withdrawing funds from all redevelopment agencies. With the realization that it was overleveraged and would be unable to continue even if the option to “pay to play” was made available, the agency began reducing its workforce from 119 employees in 2009 to 10 employees today — just enough to manage its obligations on $3.8 billion of remaining debt. The San Jose City Council took its final action to end the agency in late January by:

1. Creating an official successor agency to manage the majority of the remaining debt,
2. Naming the city manager as the executive officer of the successor agency and
3. Creating the Successor Agency Fund, which allows the city to take over the debts of the affordable housing assets and activities that had been funded by the SJRA.

Because of the SJRA’s debt obligations, it will be decades before any tax increment is available to Santa Clara County or the state.

The end of redevelopment in San Jose will have far-reaching and likely yet unknown impacts, and there are many questions still to be answered. What happens to the Strong Neighborhood designations and areas of investment? How will the San Jose Department of Housing replace the 20 percent of its budget that came from SJRA affordable housing funds? How will the City of San Jose continue to provide the necessary infrastructure in downtown and offer incentives for future development?

Next Steps
It remains unclear how cities in California will fare in the wake of redevelopment’s disappearance. Some of the tools that might replace redevelopment, such as Infrastructure Financing Districts, are complicated to use and don’t fund all of the things redevelopment used to do. SPUR is committed to figuring out what should be next now that redevelopment is gone. We are going to need new tools if our cities are to thrive.

Join us February 29 for a SPUR forum: The Death of Redevelopment >>

The General Plan, while simple in name, is one of a city’s most important documents.  It determines how, where, when and if a city will grow. It shapes what our neighborhoods look like, where our places of work are located, and where our parks, schools and homes intersect — or don’t. It directs development to be pedestrian, bike or transit-oriented — or not. And it can make or break a city’s long-term success, since the policies and direction it lays out remain in place until a new General Plan is created, which can be years or decades away depending on the jurisdiction.

For San Jose, the 10th largest city in the United States, it’s been almost two decades. The city was overdue for an update and needed a strategy to direct growth to accommodate a forecasted 470,000 new jobs and 120,000 new housing units through 2040. After a four-year planning process, the San Jose City Council adopted the Envision San Jose 2040 General Plan on November 1. The document notes five community priorities: promoting economic development, ensuring fiscal sustainability, providing environmental leadership, building in targeted areas called “urban villages,” and promoting transit use. These five were emphasized in addition to the other key concepts of community-based planning, prioritizing downtown as a destination, maintaining the urban growth boundary and designing for a healthy community.

The big idea in the plan is to create urban villages, specific areas that will provide active, walkable, bicycle-friendly, transit-oriented, mixed-use urban settings for new housing and job growth.  The urban villages identified fall into four categories: regional transit, local transit, commercial and residential areas.  All are are located along existing regional and local transit lines or in locations identified by their potential for redevelopment or enhancement. In a sense, the new San Jose General Plan follows the current convention of American planning, protecting most of the city from change, while designating a smaller number of sites for intensive development. But you get a sense of the enormous scale of San Jose’s ambition from the number — 70! — of designated urban villages.

The plan also promotes the physical health of the community by way of designating land uses to promote walking, access to healthy food and backyard agriculture. And unlike previous plans, Envision San Jose 2040 will come before the city council every four years to review the phasing priorities of the plan, track progress and provide consistency through changing future councils. These straight-forward concepts and priorities mark a defining departure from the car-centric, sprawling, bedroom community that San Jose started with as a result of poor land use planning prior to the 1970s.

The success of San Jose’s 2040 General Plan will depend on its implementation, its ability to provide clarity and assurance to the development community through the urban village policy framework, an appropriate update of the zoning code to correspond with the new land designations and, ultimately, the fortitude of the planning staff and city council to adhere to the plan as staff and city counsels evolve and change.

Read the current draft of the Envision San Jose 2040 General Plan >>

Many in the audience called on MTC and ABAG to add an additional scenario focused on equity, jobs and the environment. There were several dozen supporters of this scenario, and they heavily outnumbered the small contingent who spoke about the evils of central planning, socialism, income distribution and the perceived illegality of the entire planning process. SPUR weighed in on the debate with a policy letter to the MTC commissioners. At the meeting, we boiled down our recommendations to two main points:

After threats to reduce service by nearly half, Caltrain officials last night agreed to scale back their drastic proposed cuts. The rail system’s governing agencies have brokered a deal to avoid the worst-case scenario, which would have run only 48 trains on weekdays, a dramatic drop from the current 86. Through a patchwork of solutions — including a 25-cent fare hike and eliminating some trains and stations — Caltrain will preserve most of its current level of service. In July, Caltrain will reduce the number of trains to 76 on weekdays and close the Hayward Park station in San Mateo, the Capitol station in San Jose and the Bayshore station in Brisbane.

But this short-term solution, which if approved would extend only through fiscal year 2012, doesn’t solve Caltrain’s deeper problem: it’s managed by a coalition of three different counties and lacks a dedicated funding source. Meanwhile, Bay Area commuters have come to depend on it — and they’ve made it one of the most effective transit systems in the region. Ridership has increased 44 percent since 2004, thanks in part to 79 mph Baby Bullet service that delivers passengers from San Francisco to San Jose in under an hour. And Caltrain’s farebox recovery ratio is 47.4 percent — among the highest of Bay Area transit agencies.

A lot is riding (no pun intended) on the outcome of Caltrain’s fate. The Association of Bay Area Governments projects that in 25 years, there will be nearly 700,000 additional jobs and 350,000 additional households in the three counties Caltrain serves. Total employment and population in the areas nearest to Caltrain stations will be in the millions. Additionally, Caltrain is essential to the region’s strategy in complying with SB 375, California’s landmark carbon-reduction mandate. Each five-car train takes approximately 650 automobiles off the road — vehicles that would otherwise be contributing to the congestion and carbon emissions on the already clogged I-280 and U.S. 101 highways.

While Caltrain has avoided the worst in the last week, this solution is only short term. Saving this critical system will require dedicated funding — and probably a new, less-convoluted governance structure. Today SPUR published a discussion paper recommending potential fixes for Caltrain’s long-term future.

• Read SPUR's discussion paper: Saving Caltrain — for the long term