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. Related Link

“Three Silicon Valley organizations to help build a more vibrant downtown in San Jose with $433,700 in support from Knight Foundation” — July 8, 2014 press release

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.

San Jose was a small town until the 1950s, when it grew rapidly in the model of automobile-centric Los Angeles. Despite being the biggest city in the Bay Area, San Jose is undeniably suburban, from its planning codes to its development culture. Its land uses are spread out and its public funds are spread thin. Most people drive everywhere. Our challenge is figuring out how to urbanize a place characterized by tract homes, low-slung office parks, shopping centers and freeways.

As tastes and values have shifted away from strictly suburban lifestyles, the center of Silicon Valley has shifted northward. Our goal is to help these leaders make the decisions to ensure San Jose’s long-term success. City leaders in San Jose want to urbanize – and they have already had a preview of what will happen if they don’t.

Knight Foundation has been the lead funder of SPUR San Jose and is supporting us with $183,700 to tackle this problem in a few different ways: neighborhood planning, public space revitalization and engaging the public to build support for urbanism. Our first set of priorities for San Jose is as follows:

1. Focus neighborhood planning efforts where the city’s Envision 2040 goals can be realized

San Jose’s Envision 2040 General Plan designates nearly 70 urban villages to accommodate denser growth in a compact, walkable pattern. To succeed, urban village plans will need to coordinate infrastructure, streets, parks, plazas, paseos, transit facilities, stormwater management and regulations for site development.

Our goal is to make sure what’s planned is actually feasible, as planned developments can sit in bureaucratic limbo for years.

We want to make sure that planners, developers and elected officials are making choices that adhere to the city’s long-term vision. Right now, we’re building our inventory of local knowledge to get to the bottom of the city’s planning and policy challenges. We’re doing a lot of listening and asking a lot of questions. The discussions we’re having now will guide the way we advocate in the near future.

2. Promote good urban design that delivers walkable, attractive places

SPUR doesn’t intend to propose an additional set of urban design guidelines for San Jose. Many excellent guidelines already exist in San Jose and the South Bay, but they have had limited effects on the quality of the built environment. SPUR’s recommendations are meant to highlight and strengthen what we feel are the most important policies, while proposing additional ideas and mechanisms.

Our first report about San Jose, “Getting to Great Places,” was written to diagnose impediments to creating walkable, sustainable and transit-supportive urban places in San Jose and to recommend changes that would improve urban design outcomes. A commitment to good design in new development is an economic imperative for San Jose’s sustainability and long-term competitiveness.

3. Engage the public to build support for urbanism

We’ve had a lot of time to cultivate our membership in San Francisco, but when we traveled 50 miles south, we were basically starting from scratch. Our partnerships with similar organizations and San Jose institutions have helped SPUR provide greater awareness of SPUR and our mission, bringing a diversity of people to our table. TransForm, Greenbelt Alliance, the San Jose Downtown Association, San Jose State University, the San Jose Museum of Art and Kaiser are only a few of the organizations that have supported SPUR through our early years in San Jose. We are constantly pursuing new partnerships to tap the South Bay’s many different communities.

We have a public building in downtown San Jose that draws people in with forums, exhibitions and window displays. Having a storefront in the middle of downtown right near transit means we get walk-ins who are strangers to SPUR become members by the time they leave.

Change at the scale of a city takes a long time. San Jose’s pivot towards urbanism will take many decades to be fulfilled. But given how much it has going for it and the deep political alignment, we think it has as good of a chance as anywhere for succeeding.