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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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
SPUR Comment on San José's Measure E Expenditure Plan Reallocation
Advocacy LetterSPUR submits this letter in regard to proposed changes to percentage allocations and the spending plan for FY 2023-2024 Measure E funds that will alter current policy by reallocating funds away from the existing balanced commitment to the creation of new affordable housing and homelessness prevention, support, and management. We ask that the City consider alternative policy measures that include current funding strategies for the creation of affordable housing to mitigate impacts from any changes to the FY23-24 Measure E percentage allocations and spending plan that would effectively zero funds toward the development of affordable housing.
SPUR Comment on San José's Community Opportunity to Purchase Act (2023)
Advocacy LetterOn April 25th, the City Council considered and discussed COPA for San José as a component of a comprehensive housing preservation strategy. The COPA draft policy was developed with extensive community and stakeholder engagement, technical research, and feedback. San José included the program as an anti-displacement measure under the requirements of affirmatively furthering fair housing (AFFH) in the City’s draft Housing Element.
SPUR Sponsors Seven State Bills to Make Housing More Affordable
News /Housing continues to be scarce in the Bay Area and unobtainable for even many middle-income residents. SPUR is advocating for and sponsoring legislation that incentivizes and removes barriers to housing production. In addition, we are supporting a nearly $8 billion budget request for investments in affordable housing and funding for homelessness solutions.
SPUR Provides Feedback on the Zoning Incentive Program for the Downtown Oakland Specific Plan
Advocacy LetterSPUR sent a letter to Oakland’s Planning Department with comments on the Zoning Incentive Program (ZIP) for the Downtown Oakland Specific Plan (DOSP). In the letter, we recommend that the project team reconsider various aspects of the program, such as its narrative that value will be created if rents increase by over 20%, the complexity of its implementation, and its affordable housing requirements.
Office-to-Residential Conversion in San Francisco’s Changing Real Estate Market
ResearchDowntown San Francisco’s post-pandemic recovery is hindered by a lack of economic diversity and a shortage of workforce housing. Could converting vacant office space to residential use be a financially viable solution to both problems? In a first-of-its-kind study in San Francisco, SPUR, ULI San Francisco, Gensler and HR&A Advisors explored the physical and financial feasibility of redeveloping office buildings into housing, and identified policy tools to facilitate conversion.
The Bay Area Has Too Little Middle-Income Housing
News /In a new research paper, Losing Ground: What the Bay Area's Housing Crisis Means for Middle-Income Households and Racial Inequality, SPUR’s senior advisor on housing policy, Sarah Karlinsky, reveals how the high cost of housing is shaping the Bay Area in ways that erode quality of life and erase economic and racial diversity. We spoke with Sarah about the research and its implications.