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This month, 12 years after SPUR's regional expansion, the organization ushered in a new board governance structure. Our smaller, 30-member Board of Directors will provide fiduciary and strategic leadership to the organization in partnership with our three City Advisory Boards, which will support SPUR’s local research and advocacy efforts. These new appointees bring extensive knowledge in planning, housing, transportation, good government, economics, and sustainability and resilience.

���ϴ�����is co-sponsoring a number of state bills this year and lending advocacy support to many more. Our focus this legislative session is on designing safer streets and addressing California’s housing affordability and availability crisis. Here’s a look at the legislation we’re sponsoring.

The Bay Area is already facing a housing crisis: Housing is unaffordable for low- and middle-income residents, development is not keeping up with demand, and in 2022 more than 30,000 people were unhoused. If a major earthquake were to hit the region, thousands of housing units could be lost, deepening the crisis. A recent event hosted by SPUR, the Structural Engineers Association of Northern California, and the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute highlighted the region’s earthquake-related displacement risks and opportunities to reduce them.

���ϴ�����has been appointed to serve on a statewide task force that will support the state’s many transit agencies to grow ridership, improve service, and address operational challenges. The effort represents California’s best opportunity to rethink transit policy in decades. As the state looks to lean heavily on transit to meet its ambitious climate commitments, it must figure out how to create a system both bigger and much more heavily used than today’s.

SPUR’s first deputy director, Joseph Bodovitz, died on March 9, 2024, at age 93, following a very influential career in public service and environmental protection. A remembrance by the Bay Conservation and Development Commission observed, “Nobody in the entire State of California was more influential in developing California’s coastal zone management policies than Joe Bodovitz.” And it all started at SPUR.

A first-in-the-nation air quality standard for home heating equipment will dramatically improve the Bay Area's air quality, save lives, and help the state meet its climate goals. What will ensure that everyone can afford healthy, efficient, and carbon-free heat pumps? ���ϴ�����lays out how to use funding, financing, and market development to ensure heat pumps are affordable through 2027 and beyond.

The California State Legislature will soon consider legislation that would enable the Metropolitan Transportation Commission to put a regional transportation measure on a future ballot, potentially authorizing significant new funding for transit and other mobility investments. ���ϴ�����has not yet taken a formal position on a prospective measure, but we are weighing in now to ensure that any legislation that moves forward is grounded in good policy and positions the region for success at the ballot.

This week, former ���ϴ�����board chair Tomiquia Moss began her new job as secretary of California’s Business, Consumer Services and Housing Agency (BCSH). ���ϴ�����is thrilled to support Tomiquia in her new role. We recently spoke with her about what she’s looking forward to working on as BCSH secretary.

In a new report, ���ϴ�����Research Director Sarah Karlinsky describes the alphabet soup of state agencies that influence housing development — with little to no coordination of efforts to address the state’s housing crisis. We spoke with Sarah about the report’s central insight: although zoning and planning are local actions, the only way to build the millions of housing units California desperately needs is through state-level reform.

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, San Francisco had the strongest of the country’s 14 largest office markets. Now it has the weakest. And ���ϴ�����projections show that it could take decades for the city’s office market to recover. The solution? Repurpose functionally obsolete class B and C office buildings to diversify downtown and accelerate the recovery.

The “15-minute neighborhood” concept promotes people-centered development as a way cities can improve convenience, affordability, and equity while decreasing air pollution and carbon emissions. In a new policy brief, ���ϴ�����Housing and Planning Policy Manager Erika Pinto explores how the 15-minute model could help improve and accelerate San José’s approach to planning for more compact and connected urban development. We spoke with Erika about 15-minute principles and planning for more complete communities.

Parks and public spaces are signifiers of civic vitality, and their maintenance, improvement, expansion, and programming often reflect the economic times. These activities can be made sustainable by re-examining place governance — how people and organizations across sectors collaborate to shape a place’s economic, physical, and social dynamics. As San José considers how to deliver on the promise of its public green spaces, it can look to other cities that have created or reformed place governance models.