Knight Foundation

Above: San Francisco contains a decreasing share of the Bay Area’s population, while San Jose is predicted to gain residents. Source: Association of Bay Area Governments. Projections are based on its “Focused Growth” scenario. Gabriel Metcalf is executive director of SPUR, a nonprofit that promotes good urban planning and good government in the Bay Area. SPUR focuses much of its work in San Jose, one of 26 Knight communities. After being a San Francisco-based organization for over 100 years, SPUR opened its second office in San Jose in 2010. SPUR originally opened in San Francisco in 1910 as a response to the housing shortage that resulted from the 1906 earthquake, and back then we were called the San Francisco Housing Association. But the world—and SPUR – has changed a lot since then. We are now a nonprofit research group whose interests go beyond housing (and beyond San Francisco): We promote good planning and good government in the Bay Area through research, education and advocacy. We have long believed that the biggest problems cities face today should be solved from a regional perspective. It was time to expand, and San Jose was the natural choice for a second office. Why San Jose? First, San Jose is big – really big. We specialize in cities, and San Jose is the biggest in the Bay Area, dwarfing San Francisco and Oakland in geographic size and population. But beyond its sheer mass, San Jose has a great deal of potential. It is the beneficiary of many decades of civic improvements. It has a genuinely urban downtown, a dense collection of anchor institutions and a promising crop of cultural amenities. It has a low unemployment rate. And it has civic leaders who are committed to urbanism and are open to change. But despite having all this going for it, the city also has its challenges.

Stuart Cohen is executive director of TransForm, California’s leading transportation advocate, and Ann Cheng is director of GreenTRIP, TransForm’s green building certification program for new residential, mixed-use development. San Jose is one of 26 Knight communities. Photo credit: TransformCA.  What could developers do with $2.4 billion and more space? What could families do with another $8,000 in their pockets? How many more parks, plazas and bike lanes could a city make if we added more people without all the cars? These scenarios represent the potential outcome of expanding GreenTRIP in San Jose – a program that seeks a paradigm shift on how we plan and develop. San Jose is seeking to build another 120,000 homes by 2040, mostly in “urban villages” near public transportation. The city has audacious goals for this growth: to become a greener, more vibrant place that reduces solo driving trips from 80 percent of all trips to 40 percent. It also wants to attract talent that keeps it the capital of Silicon Valley, while remaining affordable to people of all incomes.  Yet the roadblocks to this kind of future are many and daunting, including outdated codes and expectations that vastly overestimate how many cars people will own and how much they will drive in these areas. Such codes result in huge parking lots that raise the cost of homes, at up to $70,000 per space, and generate more traffic.