photo looking down San Francisco's Market Street toward downtown

Reinventing Downtown

A new model to revitalize San Francisco’s urban center

photo of San Francisco with orange skies from wildfire smoke in September 2020

Shared Risk, Shared Resilience

New governance structures for community wildfire resilience

Transit funding rally at San Francisco City Hall

The SPUR Impact Report

What we got done in 2025

Building storefronts in downtown San Jose

Getting In on the Ground Floor

Activation strategies for downtown San José

photo of San Francisco City Hall with a construction crane in the foreground

Charter for Change

Empowering San Francisco’s government through charter reform

Illustration of a crane stacking cargo containers that say "sound fiscal policy," "structural change" and "economic growth"

Balancing Oakland's Budget

Closing the city’s structural deficit to move toward fiscal solvency and economic growth

Seeking Prosperity: The Facts About Low and Moderate Wage Workers

News /
Middle-wage jobs are becoming scarcer as more and more job growth takes place at the high and low ends of the wage spectrum. How can we create opportunity for low-wage workers to move up? Past efforts to address this issue have sometimes emphasized the differences between workers in different wage groups. But this often masks the specific information needed to solve the challenge.

Greener and Better Roofs

Policy Brief /
Many cities around the world have incentives and even regulations requiring green roofs in new construction. San Francisco lags substantially behind others such as Portland, New York, Chicago and Toronto in both green roof policy and in on-the-roof implementation. This memo asks what can be done to support the development and broader implementation of green roofs in San Francisco.

The San Francisco Exodus

News /
The No. 1 crisis facing San Francisco today is the skyrocketing cost of housing. As high prices push people out, the City of Oakland faces a wave of new arrivals — and new challenges. Here's how we got into this situation, and what we can do about it.

What Bay Area Bike Share Will Need to Succeed

News /
Since rolling out on August 29, Bay Area Bike Share has logged an estimated 21,138 bicycle trips and 4,380 casual members. Not bad for a pilot program. But in order for it to last — and grow — it’s important to ask how we can translate this initial success into a long-term one.

Alarming U.N. Climate Change Report May Be Too Conservative

News /
Climate scientists have raised concerns that the latest report from the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is "too conservative," referring to its lowered projections on the range of future warming based on a slight lack of temperature increase over the last decade. Despite this possibly encouraging bit of news, the IPCC's fifth major assessment continues to report unequivocal warming due to human causes.