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Formation | 1910 |
---|---|
Key people | Alicia John-Baptiste (CEO) Lydia Tan (board chair) |
Revenue (2019-20) | $7.8 million [1] |
Website | https://www.spur.org |
San Francisco Bay Area Planning and Urban Research Association, commonly abbreviated as SPUR, is a think tank focused on urban policy in San Francisco Bay Area. [2] [3]
SPUR's history dates back to 1910, when a group of city leaders came together to improve the quality of housing after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire. That group, the San Francisco Housing Association, authored a report which led to the State Tenement House Act of 1911.
In the 1930s, the SFHA continued to advocate for housing concerns. In the 1940s, the SFHA merged with Telesis, a group of professors and urban planners from UC Berkeley's city planning program led by William Wurster, to become the San Francisco Planning and Housing Association. In 1942, the association landed a major success with the creation of San Francisco's Department of City Planning.
Starting in the 1950s, SFPHA advocated for urban renewal projects in San Francisco's largely Black Fillmore neighborhood that would ultimately displace at least 4,000 people [4] and remove 4,700 homes. In 1959, the San Francisco Planning and Housing Association was reorganized into the San Francisco Planning and Urban Renewal Association. The organization served as community advisors for urban renewal projects in San Francisco's Western Addition and Fillmore neighborhoods as part of the federal urban redevelopment program. [5] [6]
Under the guise of revitalization of San Francisco as the Bay Area's central city, and a supposed effort to curb suburban sprawl and channel growth back into the urban core, their projects would ultimately displace residents and provide less housing units. [7] Urban renewal also had a strong cultural impact, destroying San Francisco's thriving Black creative community and world-famous jazz scene. [8]
Ultimately, 883 businesses and 4,729 households were displaced and 2,500 Victorians were demolished during the Western Addition project that SPUR spearheaded. [7] In 1977, the organization was renamed to the San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association. [9]
Over the years, the organization has grown to more than 6,000 members and has diversified its focus, analyzing subjects from sea-level rise and renewable energy to food security and guaranteed income programs. SPUR also provides annual analysis and voting recommendations on California, San Francisco San José and Oakland ballot measures.
The organization has connection with government and corporate forces giving it influence. Leftist activists sees it as a villain due to such influence. [10]
In 2012, SPUR initiated a long-range plan to work in all three of the Bay Area's central cities. [11] The organization began work in San José in 2012 [12] and Oakland in 2015, [13] adding "Bay Area" to its name to reflect its broader scope.
San Francisco, officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the fourth most populous city in California, with 808,437 residents, and the 17th most populous city in the United States as of 2022. The city covers a land area of 46.9 square miles at the end of the San Francisco Peninsula, making it the second-most densely populated large U.S. city after New York City and the fifth-most densely populated U.S. county, behind only four of the five New York City boroughs. Among the 92 U.S. cities proper with over 250,000 residents, San Francisco was ranked first by per capita income and sixth by aggregate income as of 2022. Colloquial nicknames for San Francisco include Frisco, San Fran, The City, and SF.
Japantown, also known historically as Japanese Town, is a neighborhood in the Western Addition district of San Francisco, California. Japantown comprises about six city blocks and is considered one of the largest and oldest ethnic enclaves in the United States.
The East Bay is the eastern region of the San Francisco Bay Area and includes cities along the eastern shores of the San Francisco Bay and San Pablo Bay. The region has grown to include inland communities in Alameda and Contra Costa counties. With a population of roughly 2.5 million in 2010, it is the most populous subregion in the Bay Area.
Redevelopment is any new construction on a site that has pre-existing uses. It represents a process of land development uses to revitalize the physical, economic and social fabric of urban space.
The Fillmore District is a historical neighborhood in San Francisco located to the southwest of Nob Hill, west of Market Street and north of the Mission District. It has been given various nicknames such as "the Moe" or "the Fill". The Fillmore District began to rise to prominence after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. As a result of not being affected by the earthquake itself nor the large fires that ensued, it quickly became one of the major commercial and cultural centers of the city.
West Oakland is a neighborhood situated in the northwestern corner of Oakland, California, United States, situated west of Downtown Oakland, south of Emeryville, and north of Alameda. The neighborhood is located along the waterfront at the Port of Oakland and at the eastern end of the San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge. It lies at an elevation of 13 feet.
The International Hotel, often referred to locally as the I-Hotel, was a low-income single-room-occupancy residential hotel in San Francisco, California's Manilatown. It was home to many Asian Americans, specifically a large Filipino American population. Around 1954, the I-Hotel also famously housed in its basement Enrico Banduccci's original "hungry i" nightclub. During the late 60s, real estate corporations proposed plans to demolish the hotel, which would necessitate displacing all of the I-Hotel's elderly tenants.
Diamond Heights is a neighborhood in central San Francisco, California, roughly bordered by Diamond Heights Boulevard and Noe Valley to the north and east and Glen Canyon Park to the south and west. It is built on three hills: Red Rock Heights on the northwest, Gold Mine Hill in center, and Fairmount Heights on the southeast.
Visitacion Valley, colloquially referred to as Viz Valley, is a neighborhood located in the southeastern quadrant of San Francisco, California.
Jingletown is a pocket arts community in Oakland, California, adjacent to the Oakland Estuary, and about two miles southeast of Lake Merritt. It is bounded by the Coast Guard Island Bridge and Fruitvale Bridges, which connect Oakland to the City of Alameda. It is part of the area called Fruitvale in East Oakland. Many working artists live in converted lofts that are common in the area.
The Treasure Island Development is a 405-acre (164 ha) major redevelopment project under construction on Treasure Island and parts of Yerba Buena Island in San Francisco Bay between San Francisco and Oakland, within San Francisco city limits. The Treasure Island Development Authority (TIDA) is a nonprofit organization formed to oversee the economic development of the former naval station. Treasure Island's development was set to break ground during mid-2012. However, on April 12, 2013, The San Francisco Chronicle reported that the deal has collapsed, with the Chinese investors from China Development Bank and China Railway Construction Corporation withdrawing from the project. The Treasure Island Project is being developed by a joint venture between Lennar and Kenwood Investments. The development is expected to cost US$1.5 billion.
Yoshi's is a nightclub located in Jack London Square in Oakland, California, United States. The venue originally opened in 1972 as a restaurant in Berkeley, later moving to Claremont Avenue in Oakland. In 1979, the restaurant expanded into a lounge/nightclub hosting local and national jazz musicians.
The San Francisco Bay Area, commonly known as the Bay Area, is a region of California centered around the San Francisco, San Pablo, and Suisun estuaries in Northern California. The Association of Bay Area Governments defines the Bay Area as including the nine counties that border the aforementioned estuaries: Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, Napa, San Mateo, Santa Clara, Solano, Sonoma, and San Francisco. Other definitions may be either smaller or larger, and may include neighboring counties that do not border the aforementioned estuaries, such as the Central Coast counties of Santa Cruz, San Benito, and Monterey, or the Central Valley counties of San Joaquin, Merced, and Stanislaus.
Save The Bay is a nonprofit organization dedicated to preserving San Francisco Bay and its related estuarine habitat areas. It was founded by Catherine Kerr, Sylvia McLaughlin, and Esther Gulick in 1961.
The San Francisco Bay Area comprises nine northern California counties and contains four of the ten most expensive counties in the United States. Strong economic growth has created hundreds of thousands of new jobs, but coupled with severe restrictions on building new housing units, it has resulted in an extreme housing shortage which has driven rents to extremely high levels. The Sacramento Bee notes that large cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles both attribute their recent increases in homeless people to the housing shortage, with the result that homelessness in California overall has increased by 15% from 2015 to 2017. In September 2019, the Council of Economic Advisers released a report in which they stated that deregulation of the housing markets would reduce homelessness in some of the most constrained markets by estimates of 54% in San Francisco, 40 percent in Los Angeles, and 38 percent in San Diego, because rents would fall by 55 percent, 41 percent, and 39 percent respectively. In San Francisco, a minimum wage worker would have to work approximately 4.7 full-time jobs to be able to spend less than 30% of their income on renting a two-bedroom apartment.
M. Justin Herman (1909–1971) was an American public administrator. From 1951 to 1959 he was head of the regional office of the Housing and Home Finance Agency in San Francisco, California. From 1959 until his death in 1971, he was the Executive Director of the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency. Under his administration, large areas of the city were redeveloped; thousands of residents, many of them poor and non-white, were forced to leave their homes and businesses.
African Americans in San Francisco, California, composed just under 6% of the city's total population as of 2019 U.S. Census Bureau estimates, down from 13.4% in 1970. There are about 55,000 people of full or partial black ancestry living within the city. The community began with workers and entrepreneurs of the California Gold Rush in the 19th century, and in the early-to-mid 20th century, grew to include migrant workers with origins in the Southern United States, who worked as railroad workers or service people at shipyards. In the mid-20th century, the African American community in the Fillmore District earned the neighborhood the nickname the "Harlem of the West," referring to New York City's Harlem neighborhood, which is associated with African American culture.
Ping Yuen and North Ping Yuen form a four-building public housing complex in the north end of Chinatown, San Francisco along Pacific Avenue. In total, there are 434 apartments. The three Pings on the south side of Pacific were dedicated in 1951, and the North Ping Yuen building followed a decade later in 1961. Some of the largest murals in Chinatown are painted on Ping Yuen, which are prominent landmark buildings taller than the typical two- or three-story Chinatown buildings that date back to the early 1900s.
North San Pedro is a neighborhood of San Jose, California, located in northern Downtown San Jose, just north of San Pedro Square.
The San Francisco Redevelopment Agency (SFRA) was an urban renewal agency active from 1948 until 2012, with purpose to improve the urban landscape through "redesign, redevelopment, and rehabilitation" of specific areas of the city.
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