Keeping the Lights On
Addressing the rent crisis for small businesses, landlords and lenders
The COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent shelter-in-place orders have thrown businesses — and especially small businesses — into survival mode. Are there ways to help businesses so that pandemic-induced failures don’t ripple through the real estate and lending industry? In collaboration with small business owners and advocates, this fall SPUR offers ideas for addressing the rent challenges for small businesses, landlords and bankers.
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brief
Undue Burden
Reforming Bay Area sales taxes
Sales taxes are a common revenue-raising tool, but they also play a role in reinforcing structural inequality. Every consumer pays the same tax rate at the register, but low-income households pay a higher percentage of their income. In a new report, SPUR explores three options for instituting a low-income sales tax credit or supplement to help create a more equitable tax code.
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report
Value Driven
How pricing can encourage alternatives to driving alone and limit the costs that driving imposes on others
Roads and parking are expensive to build, but they’re mostly free for drivers to use as much as they’d like. This kind of free access imposes serious costs on others: traffic, climate change, air pollution, and heart and lung disease. SPUR’s new report Value Driven shines a light on the invisible costs of driving and offers five pioneering strategies to address them.
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report
More for Less
How to plan and deliver the Bay Area’s major transit projects in less time, for less money and with better public value
Around the world, building major transit projects is notoriously difficult. Yet the Bay Area has an especially poor track record: Major projects here take decades from start to finish, and our project costs rank among the highest in the world. SPUR offers policy proposals that will save time, save money and add up to a reliable, integrated and frequent network that works better for everyone.
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report
Infrastructure Bay Area
A proposal for a new institution to help successfully deliver the region’s most significant transit projects
SPUR’s report More for Less examines how the Bay Area can reverse its poor track record of delivering large, complex public transit projects on time, on budget and without major defect. This companion report details one of our most significant recommendations: to establish Infrastructure Bay Area, a specialized entity that would lead the procurement and delivery of all the region’s major transit projects.
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report
Does State Tax Policy Discourage Housing Production?
California’s housing crisis is due in part to a failure to build enough new housing. Many California cities view housing as less fiscally beneficial to build than other types of development. SPUR and California Forward explore whether cities that receive a low share of the state property tax would have an incentive to produce more housing if their share of the property tax was increased.
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brief
Model Places
Envisioning a future Bay Area with room and opportunity for everyone
Over the next 50 years, the San Francisco Bay Area is expected to gain 4 million people and 2 million jobs. In a region where a crushing housing shortage already threatens quality of life, how can we welcome new residents and jobs without paving over green spaces or pushing out long-time community members? SPUR partnered with AECOM to envision an equitable and sustainable future region.
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report
The Future of Transportation
Harnessing private mobility services to support the public good
Will the rise of new mobility services like Uber and bike sharing help reduce car use, climate emissions and demand for parking? Or will they lead to greater inequality and yet more reliance on cars? SPUR proposes how private services can work together with public transportation to function as a seamless network and provide access for people of all incomes, races, ages and abilities.
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report
From Copenhagen to Tokyo
Learning from International Housing Delivery Systems
Different countries have vastly different ways of organizing their housing policies and real estate markets. Could some of them hold solutions to the Bay Area’s housing crisis? To find out, SPUR and AECOM explored housing delivery in Copenhagen, Berlin, Vienna, Amsterdam, Tokyo and Singapore. Each has a compelling and noteworthy approach that could inform future policy innovation in the Bay Area.
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research
Keeping the Doors Open
Immediate recommendations for assisting ground floor businesses in reopening
COVID-19 has accelerated the urgency of determining how to best support human and economic activity, particularly on main streets and commercial corridors. SPUR recommends actions for cities to undertake immediately to assist businesses in opening promptly following the gradual lifting of shelter-in-place restrictions.
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brief
Safety First
Improving hazard resilience in the Bay Area
The Bay Area is both a treasured place and a hazardous environment where flooding, wildfires and earthquakes are common today. These hazards are likely to become more frequent, larger and more damaging as climate change puts the region’s people, built environment and natural habitats at risk. As a region exposed to multiple hazards, how can we manage for all of them at the same time?
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report
Driving Change
Policies to expand on employer-based Mobility on Demand pilot programs and reduce drive-alone commuting in the Bay Area.
The Fair Value Commuting Demonstration project addresses a challenge that has plagued cities for decades: Too many people drive alone to work, creating traffic, wasting time and productivity, and degrading air quality and safety. Four Silicon Valley cities tested a package of strategies and technologies to tackle the issue. SPUR provided independent research to help assess the results and determine next steps.
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brief
It Takes a Village
Strategies for successful implementation of San Jose’s urban village vision
San Jose’s 2040 general plan proposed “urban villages” as a key strategy for sustainable growth. These higher-density, mixed-use urban places would concentrate new offices, stores and housing in locations accessible by transit, foot or bike. But only a handful of the 60 designated urban villages have projects underway. SPUR recommends strategies to remove barriers and successfully implement San Jose’s urban village vision.
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brief
Solving the Bay Area’s Fare Policy Problem
How streamlined, integrated fares can help the region realize the promise of transit
Each of the Bay Area’s transit operators sets its own policy for determining the fares it will charge. This creates customer confusion, inhibits people from using more than one transit service and undermines the investments the region is making in new infrastructure and technology. SPUR offers recommendations for how operators can streamline and integrate their fares to help the region realize the promise of transit.
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brief
San Francisco Bay Shoreline Adaptation Atlas
Working with nature to plan for sea level rise
As the climate continues to change, communities will need to adapt the San Francisco Bay shoreline to rising sea levels. But the Bay’s varied landscapes and overlapping jurisdictions make a coordinated response challenging. The San Francisco Bay Shoreline Adaptation Atlas proposes a new regional planning framework by dividing the 400-mile Bay shoreline into 30 distinct geographic areas that share common physical characteristics and adaptation strategies.
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report
Re-Envisioning the Guadalupe River Park
How San Jose can transform its greatest natural resource into a community gathering place for all
From New York City’s High Line to Atlanta’s BeltLine, communities across the country are transforming underutilized infrastructure into engaging public spaces. Building on this national momentum, SPUR has launched a project to reconsider the Guadalupe River Park, an underappreciated gem in downtown San Jose.
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research
Finding Transit
How better maps can make the Bay Area transit system easier to understand and navigate
Navigating transit in the Bay Area is complicated: Each of the region's 27 transit operators develops its own maps, using a wide range of styles, symbols, graphics and language. Research shows that well-designed transit maps can increase ridership and improve passengers’ understanding of the transit system. SPUR offers recommendations for creating better maps that can make Bay Area transit easier to understand and navigate.
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brief
Four Future Scenarios for the San Francisco Bay Area
Planning for the region in the year 2070
This report, the first product of the SPUR Regional Strategy, uses a scenario planning process to look at four uncertainties that the Bay Area will contend with over the next 50 years: the economy, housing, transportation and the physical form that growth takes. The resulting scenarios serve as “myths of the future,” stories that reveal the potential long-term outcomes of choices the region makes today.
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research
San Francisco's Next Mayor
A Blueprint for Change
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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brief
Harnessing High-Speed Rail
How California and its cities can use rail to reshape their growth
In connecting the Bay Area to Los Angeles, high-speed rail will run through cities such as Fresno and Bakersfield that were bypassed when Interstate 5 was built. High-speed rail can reconnect these cities with each other and the coast, which has the potential to improve their economies. It can also change California’s sprawling growth pattern by revitalizing downtowns and shifting growth back toward urban centers.
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report