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 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.
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.