San Francisco, one of the most expensive housing markets in the country, was more than double the California median price in the first quarter and more than 350 percent above the national average.

In the face of spiking foreclosure rates, plummeting home values and slow sales, what will draw investors back to the housing market? How will the risk in the housing market be re-priced to attract new capital?

How much energy is spent making sure that new buildings "fit in"! Sometimes we're better off thanks to this design-by-committee. But what we lose is the surprise of the unexpected, the quirky stuff that makes a city special. I agree with Pablo Picasso: "Ah, good taste! What a dreadful thing. Good taste is the enemy of creativity."

Telesis' 1942 exhibit, "A Space for Living," inspired the San Francisco Housing Association to expand from housing reform advocacy to a group concerned with city planning overall, renaming itself the San Francisco Planning and Housing Association, which in turn, became SPUR.

The question of how we hold on to the best of a city — architecturally, historically, as a matter of quality of the urban experience and quality of life — is deeply bound to the question of how cities change,and in particular the tension between "preservation" and "development."

Since the recession has lowered the pressure on both sides of the development/preservation equation, this time of inactivity could be devoted to the kind of even-handed planning that would mitigate future battles by evaluating the benefits of both.

There is a cliché that city planning is simply fixing the mistakes of past planners. And yet, we cannot just sit on the sidelines. We have to learn from past mistakes and approach our activism with a sense of humility about all that we can’t know. But still we must act.

These projects are critical to moving San Francisco's city-wide bicycle network towards completion. Better biking infrasturcture will encourage greater use, leading to improvements in mobility, health, livability and reduced emissions.

SPUR's inaugural exhibition, Agents of Change, examines the history of citymaking in San Francisco and frames our current challenges in light of the many successes — and failures — of previous eras. We invite you to meet the people who shaped the city: the City Builders, the Progressives and Classicists, the Regionalists, the Moderns, the Contextualists and the Eco-Urbanists.

SPUR’s most recent policy paper, “Critical Cooling,” found that a mandatory recycling rule is one of the most significant policies the city can enact to reduce emissions, reducing more than 186,000 tons per year if we increase diversion just 5 percent. The reason that a small increase in recycling and composting makes such a huge difference in terms of global warming emissions is that food scraps emit a much stronger greenhouse gas than CO2 when put into a landfill. Those emissions are avoided if food scraps are broken down using typical composting processes. This can all be accomplished with no additional impact on the city budget. We strongly urge the Board of Supervisors to pass this well-vetted and readily implementable piece of legislation.