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
Losing Ground
ResearchSPUR’s new research paper, Losing Ground: What the Bay Area’s Housing Crisis Means for Middle-Income Households and Racial Inequality, aims to identify how the Bay Area’s housing market has become shaped by scarcity and wide economic divides not only among income groups but also among races and ethnicities.
Housing Advocates to State: Transit-Oriented Communities Don't Work Without Transit
Advocacy LetterSPUR and other housing advocates request the state take action to protect public transit, which provides an essential mobility option for residents of infill housing developments across California. Left unaddressed, transit's fiscal cliff will harm the state's most vulnerable residents and undermine the production of infill housing.
SPUR Sponsors Bill to Increase Shared Parking (AB 894 - Friedman)
Advocacy LetterSPUR is sponsoring a bill to require that agencies allow land owners and managers to share underutilized parking and to count such shared parking toward meeting parking requirements. The bill would also require new developments and parking lots funded by public agencies to evaluate shared parking options. If passed, this bill will reduce a common circumstance of costly parking being required in situations where other parking is available nearby.
Op-Ed: Earthquakes in Turkey and Syria Are a Wake-Up for California. We're Not Prepared for the Big One.
News /The devastating earthquakes that shook Turkey and Syria last Monday have taken the lives of over 23,000 people. Such a staggering death toll is hard to wrap the mind around and may seem like an impossibility here in California. Yet, the reality is that a similar magnitude earthquake near Los Angeles or San Francisco could lead to thousands of residents injured or killed and many more displaced, temporarily or permanently, from their damaged or destroyed homes.
Op-Ed: Fake Environmental Reviews are Killing Good Housing Projects. Here’s What California Can Do About it.
News /California needs a lot more housing in its temperate cities. Enough to bring down rents, to house the homeless and to accommodate the climate refugees of the future — people who will have been driven from their homes by wildfire, flooding or intolerable heat. This means neighborhoods have to change, too. Not drastically or overnight, but persistently: more duplexes and fourplex intermixed with single-family homes, more apartments in commercial corridors and larger buildings in high-demand locations near transit.
2022 Election Delivers Mixed Results for SPUR Priorities
News /SPUR developed several ballot measures during the latest election cycle, and its research heavily influenced a handful of others. Bay Area voters considered measures on streamlining housing approvals, continuing pandemic-era slow streets programs, enacting good government reforms and funding programs to address air quality and climate change. While we didn’t win ’em all, we’re pleased to see a number of SPUR’s ideas gaining traction around the region.