Housing

Our goal: Make it affordable to live here.

SPUR’s housing agenda:

• Zone for more housing—in the right locations.
• Invest in permanently affordable housing.
• Enable more housing to be affordable by design.
• Rethink parking requirements.
• Encourage secondary units.
• Get housing development fees right.

Read more from SPUR’s Agenda for Change

  • SPUR Report

    Room for More

    Our housing agenda for San Jose 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.

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  • 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.

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  • SPUR Report

    Re-Envisioning the San Francisco Housing Authority

    The San Francisco Housing Authority has a budget short fall and lacks funding to meet its capital needs. SPUR offers recommendations to help the agency become financially sustainable over the long term.

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  • SPUR Report

    Affordable by Design

    Housing units that are affordable "by design" cost less to produce because they’re small, efficiently designed and don’t come with a parking space. Could this be a new way to produce middle-income housing without using public subsidy?

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  • 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.

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Updates and Events

Getting Local Land Use Approvals Right

News October 9, 2018
What can California and its cities do to bring down the soaring costs of housing? Land entitlement is one process that could be reformed to speed up the construction of new housing and reduce costs. At a recent SPUR forum, researchers and planners discussed how state and city reforms might (or might not) streamline the approval processes.

SPUR Supports the Mayor's Process Improvements Ordinance

Policy Letter June 19, 2018
SPUR strongly supports this strategic effort to streamline the approvals process by: Allowing 100 percent affordable housing projects to be approved administratively; streamlining the approval of large downtown residential projects; and standardizing neighborhood notification requirements, among other improvements.

The Urgency to Achieve an Inclusive Economy in the Bay Area

Urbanist Article May 29, 2018
The latest tech boom has stretched the Bay Area’s income inequality gap to its widest level in decades. Can we figure out how to ensure that this growth is created by, and benefits, all workers and families?

San Francisco's Next Mayor

White Paper May 9, 2018
By any measure, the previous decade has been a period of dramatic change and growth for San Francisco. But for many, this unprecedented prosperity has failed to address — and has even contributed to — the many challenges the city still faces. SPUR offer a platform of specific policy goals and practical solutions for the next mayor and the city for the years ahead.

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