(Unedited) Podcast Transcript 536: Keys to San Francisco’s Future

This week we’re joined by Sujata Srivastava, Chief Policy Officer at SPUR, to discuss a recent policy brief entitled The Next 100 Days: An urbanist decision-making framework for San Francisco’s new mayor. We discuss reforming the city’s governance structure, what’s needed for downtown recovery, transit policy and climate resilience.

To listen to this episode, visit Streetsblog USA, or find it deep in our archive.

For those that like to read, we’ve got a full AI generated unedited transcript of the show below:

Jeff Wood: . Sujata, Srivastava, welcome to the Talking Headways podcast.

Sujata Srivastava: Thanks for having me.

Jeff Wood: Thanks for being here live in the studio. We appreciate you being here. Before we get started, can you tell us a little bit about yourself?

Sujata Srivastava: I’m the Chief Policy Officer at SPUR, we’re a public policy organization, does research my, in planning for a very long consulting firms.

That looked at the urban economics component of how we build cities, and now I am really enthusiastic about putting a lot of those ideas into practice.

Jeff Wood: So what got you interested in cities or planning or anything along those lines?

Sujata Srivastava: I was in college in the nineties dating myself and you might remember how much was happening with like [00:03:00] discussion about urban issues and it was actually very much pathologizing what was going on in public housing and what was going on in cities like la.

And I took some classes about urban studies and urban politics. They were called in college and I just got really captivated by thinking about this as a complex connection between place and sociology and economy. Like it’s such an interdisciplinary way of thinking about the world and connections and how it affects people’s daily lives.

That’s really what drew me to that. And then once I realized oh, urban planning is a thing, it’s like a profession. You can actually build skills and look at this a little bit more deeply and not just be theory, but practice. That also was really compelling to me.

Jeff Wood: I feel like a lot of people come to planning from that direction where they’re like, oh, this is a thing I can do.

This is a job I can have. ’cause that’s how I came to it. I had no idea. Initially I was trying to get into kinesiology so I could be like a track coach or something, but then I got into [00:04:00] geography, took a class on cities, and then I was like, oh, this is exciting. And then a person sitting next to me in one of my classes you can do this as a profession.

And I was like, really? This is awesome. I feel like a lot of us come to it that way, which is funny because everybody’s impacted by city planning and cities and transportation, urban policy, but it’s something that doesn’t really show itself until later in studies and in school.

Sujata Srivastava: Yeah. And I think it can be invisible, right?

You’re just going about your life and you’re not thinking about what are all the things that made this possible.

Jeff Wood: So we also worked together for a lot of years on a number of TOD related projects, but perhaps you could share a little bit more with folks about what you worked on before you came to spur.

You mentioned some of that, but I wanna hear a little bit more.

Sujata Srivastava: Right before I was working at Spur, I was at Strategic Economics, which was part of this Center for Transit Oriented development partnership that you and I worked on DOD studies together. Strategic Economics is a boutique firm that does consulting mostly with public agencies like cities and transit agencies, sometimes regional governments, and [00:05:00] looks at what are some of the market and feasibility and economic factors that guide development and planning and communities.

My personal expertise was more on looking at affordable housing strategies. So how do you leverage the market to be, create more affordability? How do you design community benefit? So that communities are getting what is really needed out of new development, and then when is it actually not appropriate to ask new development to pay for these things that really should be more distributed.

And then I also did a lot of work on economic development, small business strategies, and the firm was really focused on this idea of growing in infill location. So all of our work was really with that orientation. So Dina Belzer, the president, was one of the, I think, initial congress for new urbanist people, and also had this ideology behind the practice.

And so we did a lot of work nationally on facilitating planning for [00:06:00] and implementing transit-oriented communities.

Jeff Wood: Do you have a favorite project from that time?

Sujata Srivastava: There are two projects that kind of stick with me. One was a BRT corridor in Connecticut for the knowledge corridor. And that was interesting because it was a corridor in a part of the country that is not growing.

It’s actually shrinking and aging and thinking about what does it mean to have a transit oriented development strategy in a place that’s actually sprawling and not growing. And so what it was really focused on was like the anchor institutions, since there’s a lot of major employers, there’s a insurance industry cluster, there are hospitals and universities.

And so that was really the basis for thinking about what opportunities were for being able to concentrate development and create the best benefit out of the transit system. And also BRT something that is really different from the rail strategies that we typically see in other places. And then the other one [00:07:00] that I really learned a lot from was Charlotte.

They were really trying to look at what were the opportunities to create more affordability. They had actually been very successful at developing along their transit corridor, but what they realized afterwards was that they hadn’t really had any guardrails around that to make sure that they getting affordable housing and preserving sites for affordability.

So as they were expanding, they wanted to learn those.

Jeff Wood: Those are two very different places. There’s a low, slow, not growing place and a high growth place. Charlotte’s a very high growing place. Yeah. And so that’s interesting because you bring that to like San Francisco, which is definitely a place that’s growing, but also it has, it struggles because of post pandemic stuff.

And so I’m wondering if there’s anything from any of those projects you took with you. Obviously there’s a lot of stuff you took with you, but

Sujata Srivastava: Yeah, I mean it’s part of the narrative for me when we think about San Francisco, specifically the San Francisco in this moment where office vacancies. Higher, [00:08:00] depending on what data source you’re using.

It’s pretty similar to places like Hartford, Connecticut that have struggled to attract office tenants. It’s not the same because we have the job base and we have the talent and we have a lot of growth in those ways. But it’s similar in terms of like how do you rethink spaces? And it’s also like a mindset shift mindset because other places have had to really be strategic about how they market themselves and like what kinds of investments they’re making to attract private money.

And in San Francisco, I think they’ve had the luxury of not having to think about it that way for a very long time. And so there’s something to learn from those places about what are the kinds of strategies that actually sense what are needed and sector turn.

Jeff Wood: I wanna ask you about Spur to start with.

We’ve had folks on from Spur a lot of times before, but for folks that might not be familiar around the country with what Spur is, can you give us kind of a background on how Spur was founded, what Spur is the history, but also what you all are working on now? [00:09:00]

Sujata Srivastava: So Spurs been around for over a hundred years.

It was actually founded post 1906 Earthquake as a civic organization of volunteers who wanted to rebuild the city, and I think it was called the San Francisco Housing Association when it was first started, and it has evolved. It was initially San Francisco and now it’s a regional organization because we know that housing and planning and transportation and sustainability, all of those things are regional issues.

So in the 2010s, they opened a San Jose office and an Oakland office. So we now have a three city perspective. We also do a lot of work for the nine County Bay area region, and we are about policy, research, education, and advocacy. So I think that’s one thing that’s unique about Spur is we’re not purely a think tank that’s publishing research.

We’re also doing a lot of on the ground advocacy, and we’re doing as much community building around urbanism as we can. And we have five policy areas that we work in. [00:10:00] Housing, transportation, sustainability and resilience, and each policy has big initiative.

Jeff Wood: So I also wanted to talk with you about where we are right now in San Francisco. I mentioned it a little bit, the post pandemic malaise but there’s a lot of ink spilled nationally about us. And I just wanna know realistically, like what are some of the issues that we’re coming up against here in the city versus maybe what people think we’re up against from the outside.

Sujata Srivastava: Yeah, I think San Francisco does have challenges around the transformation of how people work and move in the city. Everything has been focused on downtown in terms of the transportation networks and the job concentration in San Francisco and with hybrid work still remains the largest employment center and where most people work.

But I think we are at about 50% of the, daytime visitation that we used to have in [00:11:00] office buildings and tourism has taken a pretty big hit. Most of that because of some of the restrictions, particularly in Asia. And so both of those things were actually what made the downtown work in terms of having a lot of support for small businesses and retail.

When you think about Union Square and how that operates, it’s really based on office and tourism. So those shifts have been pretty stark in San Francisco because San Francisco was actually a successful urban center in some ways, right? It had that density, it had that focus, and so it’s more disruptive in a place like San Francisco than it would be in a like Atlanta, where things are much more distributed.

I think those issues still have to be grappled with. And at the same time, a lot of the problems in San Francisco predate the pandemic. So you know, the income inequality and the unhoused, those issues are just amplified, I think, by recent trends. But we know that there were a lot of things that weren’t working super well with downtown, that it was not really serving the needs of a lot of [00:12:00] people, and that it was too dependent on some specific industries.

And so there wasn’t really a lot of resilience built into the system.

Jeff Wood: We’ll get to that in a second. I have a whole batch of questions related to downtown and what’s happening there, but we just had a, an election and we elected a new mayor. Mayor Lurie has done some stuff in the first a hundred days.

You all basically put together this brief that looks at what should we do with the next a hundred days? And when I read it, I felt like this could be for any mayor really, because it’s the issues that San Francisco is always gonna be focused on. Can you talk a little bit about like where the brief came from and the idea behind the timelines of like a hundred days and moving forward with some recommendations from that perspective?

Sujata Srivastava: Yeah, I think that the idea of a new administration is that it offers an opportunity to look at things a little bit differently and make change if you have an administration like this one. I think the entire platform has been about changing the way that the city operates. And so we looked at this as an opportunity to put forth a lot of the ideas that have been developed by Spur for a long [00:13:00] time.

So these are not new ideas, it’s just a framework for being able to focus over the next a hundred days. So the first a hundred days are about, okay, here I am, I’m gonna learn about the city, I’m gonna figure out how things work. And the next a hundred days is an opportunity for okay, how are you gonna prioritize?

And because we know there’s so much chaos at the federal level, it’s really hard for city workers, city department heads to be able to not just be putting out fires.

Sujata Srivastava: And we think it’s important for Spur to play that role of just shining a light on what we think is the most important thing to be advancing.

And not to let that alter just because of. We started when we wrote the paper with this idea of governance and what does it take to make the city be able to respond to the needs. Once you have the right structure in place, it’s much easier for you to be able to.

Jeff Wood: So what is the governance structure of San Francisco look like in the way that you wish that it would [00:14:00] function?

Sujata Srivastava: It’s super complicated because it’s a city and county, so it’s unique, like it’s hard to compare San Francisco to any other place in California.

Sujata Srivastava: And also like over the decades, the city has become even more complex in the way that it’s structured and the authority to make decisions has been distributed in many ways.

So we don’t really have a purely strong mayor form of government. We have a board of supervisors. The idea of a board of supervisors is they do the county stuff. That’s not really how it works when you have a combined city county, and then we have city administrator. Most cities either have a city administrator or a strong mayor, and we have this sort of like mix of things and it can be really hard to know who’s really in charge.

The other problem is that I think there are either 54 or 56 departments under the mayor’s office. No single mayor. Yeah. Imagine if you had 54 direct reports, how would you actually be able to manage that complexity? And I think over the years, [00:15:00] because there’s been concern about oh, we don’t want the mayor to be too powerful.

We wanna make sure that our supervisors are able to do things in their little districts. It just has diluted that even more. We also have commissions and task forces in the city that actually have quite a bit of authority to hire and fire people to make really big strategic decisions. And so when something goes wrong as a resident, it would be really hard for you to know.

Who’s responsible for that? Is it this amorphous board of supervisors? Is it the mayor? Is it some random commission that I don’t even really know about? And so part of what needs to happen is just a streamlining of that decision making authority and clear lines of responsibility so that everybody knows, okay, if there’s an issue with this development project, it’s not proceeding.

The permitting is broken. I know who’s ultimately responsible for that.

Jeff Wood: Who wins in this system? Like ultimately, like who be, who benefits from this?

Sujata Srivastava: It’s a system that [00:16:00] benefits the people who know how to navigate it, right? And that’s not equitable. Because it’s not transparent, right? So if you are an inner insider, you can figure out how to do the workarounds.

It also, I think when you have a lot of bureaucracy, it can actually create more opportunity for corruption because it’s about cutting through the red tape. And sometimes for good reasons, like the outcome that you’re trying to seek might be a good outcome. But the only way to do it is by ducking the system.

And so you don’t wanna create a system that’s so complicated that the only way for people to get things done is to skip a bunch of steps.

Jeff Wood: Yeah. You also bring up procurement. I think procurement is understated as a way to achieve a lot of goals. Like we had folks on from Europe to talk about Oslo, Rotterdam, Copenhagen, and how they’re working on procurement systems to make their cities more sustainable.

And so you can use procurement as a way to achieve your goals. And so I’m curious how that helps us if we can figure out like [00:17:00] all these things that we purchase, all these services that we acquire, all of these things people probably don’t even realize, like how much money we spend on little things, staples, but we can actually achieve our goals through that as well.

In addition to the restructuring of the government itself. There’s things like procurement go a long way.

Sujata Srivastava: Yeah, and it’s one out of every $3 in the city’s budget that goes towards procuring goods and services. And that’s everything from, building something to contracting IT services. And yeah, you’re right.

It’s a powerful tool. The good purchasing movement of just making sure that you are spending dollars in a way that is ethical and brings other benefits to the city. Those are really important pieces of it. We also have to make sure that the system isn’t so complicated that it’s creating additional costs and burdens on the vendors and nonprofits that are delivering those services.

So right now it takes generally anywhere from nine months to 18 months to get under contract. It’s [00:18:00] extremely expensive. Whether it’s like a $20,000 contract or a 2 million contract, it takes in a tremendous amount of resources to just get somebody under contract. Not to mention all the things that happen after somebody’s on contract is a city of reimbursing them on time for the services that they’re providing.

If you’re a small nonprofit and you’re just maybe providing meals to your community, you need to know that you’re not gonna be in the red trying to do that, and that the city’s gonna reimburse you on time. You also wanna know what the process is for getting under contract and that the goalposts aren’t gonna shift, because if they are, then as good as you are providing that service, you might decide it’s not worth it.

It takes too long, and even though you’re the best contractor for the job, you don’t have the resources to go through all of that mess. So I think the intentions behind the procurement processes have been, generally good. We wanna make sure that we have the right rules in place and that we are achieving certain kinds of outcomes that we think are important social objectives that we might [00:19:00] have as a city.

But when you actually translate that into the process, if it’s taking that long for somebody to get under contract, and if there’s no assurance of like how they’re gonna be evaluated for their performance and how they’re gonna get paid, then it’s really creating a problem for actually achieving the outcomes that you’re hoping to get.

So what we have in our report is some suggestions about how the city actually needs to do some real soul searching around what are the objectives that are appropriate to try to achieve through procurement. There’s certain kinds of things that are outside of the city’s control in terms of social objectives, and so trying to integrate them into the procurement process might be really hard, even though the board of supervisors thinks that these are important things to try to do, so you gotta be realistic about what you can actually achieve through procurement and simplify the process.

Jeff Wood: It feels we used to talk about TOD all the time. It was always like we’re asking TOD to do too much. It sounds like you could also do that for procurement too, where you’re like, oh all of the trucks in your fleet have to be electric if you provide this service, or [00:20:00] you have to do this and this in order to provide us this service.

Even though those goals are laudable, it can be overly complicated and it also feels like it would benefit incumbents. People that already have the contracts to start with and keep out competition.

Sujata Srivastava: That’s right. There are times when they only get one or two vendors going for things because it’s too hard and you have to know how to navigate the system.

Jeff Wood: Yeah. What is this trust-based accountability that you all have brought into the paper?

Sujata Srivastava: There are a lot of media stories all the time about some city employee that did something wrong, and so therefore, let’s create a whole new process on top of what we already have.

Jeff Wood: Build a whole new like widget to Yeah.

Let people get through. Yeah.

Sujata Srivastava: And then our report, we have this illustration of a maze, and so you just build out a new section of the maze. Instead of just like clarifying the maze, then there’s less opportunity for somebody to go around the rules. I think what we also sometimes under appreciate is that most of the time when people break rules, they get caught, like the system does catch them.[00:21:00]

And so it’s not just about preventing anything from happening, but about capacity building for the city staff and the vendors so that they understand like there’s so many different ways to get under contract right now that city staff don’t actually know what the best way is for them to bring in a vendor and that’s a problem.

So then on the vendor side, train them on here’s what you’re gonna have to do to be able.

So a trust-based accountability system would be, everybody knows the rules, everybody has the same information, and they can go through that process if something goes wrong. There are still mechanisms to capture that, but you’re not designing the whole system for that, one to 3% of potential bad actors because there’s always gonna be some bad actors.

Yeah. But you don’t need to necessarily assume that everybody is a bad [00:22:00] actor. I think most people who do this kind of work have the best motives.

Jeff Wood: It just made me think of the jury duty selection process for San Francisco. I went maybe like a, in the last six months anyways, I went and then, they bring you into a room and then you have to watch this video about bias and, which is really good video by the way.

And just like having that kind of system seems to work. Going in, watching the video, making sure everybody’s on the same page before you are chosen or not chosen and, then everybody knows what their responsibilities are. Feels like something similar would be beneficial for procurement or for, getting people on board.

It also made me think of a story of how San Francisco County lost my marriage license. Oh no. That seems important. It is important. It was crazy because when an I got married, we did it in Lafayette, and then we had like my sister and my friend sign to make sure that there’s witnesses and then I brought it to the city and I turned it in.

And then when I came back to get the license because I needed it for something, they’re like we can’t find it. And I was like, I know you got it. I have a [00:23:00] page that says you received it. I got a receipt from you. Basically it says you received it on this date. And they’re like we don’t have it.

So you need to go and get these things signed again. We’re not all in the same place. I need to get this signed before, like next week or it expires like the whole thing. Oh wow. And so just little things like that. Frustrating. And I know that, that has nothing to do with procurement or anything like that, but just like San Francisco’s intake process and all that sometimes can be frustrating.

Sujata Srivastava: Yeah. And you think about the most vulnerable people are the ones who rely on government the most for essential services and for social benefits. And they’re the ones who have to navigate these really complicated processes. And if you really wanna make a difference in people’s lives, it’s a really good place to do these reforms.

Jeff Wood: Yeah, make it simple.

Sujata Srivastava: Make it simple.

Jeff Wood: Okay. So re-imagining downtown, the pandemic has taken a substantial chunk out of our office workers, which means less businesses in the area as well as transit ridership, but it’s always been a risk because of our heavy reliance, as you mentioned on tourism and employment in office space.

So what are some of these headwinds that are going against downtown and what are some of the possible [00:24:00] solutions I.

Sujata Srivastava: I think the biggest headwinds are just that it takes a really long time to change places and we don’t really have a lot of the tools and resources.

In California’s history to be able to do like big transformations. And we used to have redevelopment agencies, which were not perfect at all, but they had authority and tools to be able to transform places. And it’s not really just a downtown San Francisco issue. It’s like downtowns all over.

But especially in San Francisco where you had such a high density of jobs and a unique economic structure, I think we really can use this as an opportunity to diversify downtown, make it more inclusive of small businesses, affordable housing, arts, and culture. There’s like a lot of stuff that wasn’t really there in the before times, but that requires some financial resources and some land use authority and some governance, like some streamlined decision making to happen.[00:25:00]

Those are some of the ways that we’ve been thinking about it is like what are the kinds of financing, governance, land use authority that are needed to be able to face this magnitude of the challenge? Because you got, 35 million square feet of space, some of which may get re-tenant, but it’ll take a very long time.

And so what do you do in the next five to 10 years? I think this is where the public sector has an important role to play because I think the private sector on its own will not fix this problem in the short term. It’s gonna take decades. Really.

Jeff Wood: Their incentives are off, it feels

Sujata Srivastava: yeah, and I think the other headwinds, of course, are just.

Tariffs and all of the other federal economic policies that are making it harder for all kinds of development to happen and for all kinds of infrastructure investments to happen.

Jeff Wood: Is it also hard to get attention on doing the little things when you have this want to bring a big project or make a big splash?

Like I know that Mayor Breed was like talking about building a soccer stadium downtown, which I think is a silly idea, but it made like [00:26:00] a headline in the paper. And so I’m wondering what the trade-offs are of trying to make this big splashy headline generating idea versus doing the little things that will bring people back a little bit at a time, but it will be more sustainable over time.

Sujata Srivastava: Yeah, that’s a good question. I feel like some of the stuff around just making it easier for small businesses to operate downtown that are just like system changes, those are things that can apply regardless of who that small business is. And then the same way I’ve been taking this approach of we can have lots of use cases, but what is the system that’s needed to hold that a responsiveness to if a soccer stadium, if a soccer team wants to be downtown, maybe there’s a way to make that happen. Or if a university wants to come downtown or if there’s some other kind of big anchor that wants to be downtown. I think you can design these tools and these structures and build the capacity of city staff to be able to respond to any one of those use cases.

If you have the right things in place. If you have the right ingredients in place.

Jeff Wood: Yeah. Before [00:27:00] we also did something like tax breaks for mid-market and stuff like that where we were focusing on specific parts of the city or specific entities that might come in. For example, Twitter came to that space and so you know, it’s, as you mentioned, the report better to not focus on those things that we did in the past because it was too focused on one group versus maybe making it more generalized.

As you just mentioned, for a larger group, like small businesses, it’s really hard to get into a storefront. There’s a place up the street just here in Noway Valley that’s been empty for the last 10 years and then part of it is just because of like how expensive it is to actually rent a place.

People are sitting on Prop 13 gold, but also just like getting your permits to open a place.

Sujata Srivastava: Yeah. We wrote a paper about small businesses in San Francisco called Small and Mighty that highlighted that exact issue. Yeah. If the permitting process is so complicated. Again, it’s just the same thing as that procurement system.

There’s very few entrepreneurs that know how it. Cut through all of that. I think that the city’s done a pretty good job at trying to fix some of those permitting [00:28:00] challenges. But I think there’s like some bigger fundamental issues about all the different agencies that have permitting functions and how you coordinate across all of them.

Because like you might get some direction from public health and then different direction from DBI and then, there’s just too many different permitting authorities for one small business to.

Jeff Wood: There’s also a discussion about conversions for offices because there is so much space to residential space. That’s a tough discussion I feel like, ’cause they might be used in the future, but also I’ve heard a lot of discussions about how the floor plates don’t quite work or the architects have to work really hard to make sure that everybody has windows and what they need.

How easy or hard is it to have that discussion about conversions when buildings weren’t necessarily built for residential? They were built for office.

Sujata Srivastava: Yeah, it doesn’t really work for every building. So we worked with Gensler to do an assessment of the building stock in downtown San Francisco. And interestingly, San Francisco ranks above a lot of other cities because we have a lot of buildings that actually [00:29:00] are good candidates because there’s historic buildings. They don’t have like giant floor plates. It’s not like the federal buildings in DC Yeah. That are just so massive and horizontal rather than vertical.

So there are actually some good, I think it was over 35% of the buildings that were good candidates. The problem is the economics of it. It’s just really expensive to do any kind of construction. In San Francisco, the encouraging thing is that on a per unit basis. For a high rise high, it cost about 1.2 million to build a new high rise for these conversions.

It was considerably lower. It was more like 800,000 per unit. So it’s still difficult’s a lot to make the math work for sure. But we did some financial analysis with help from HRA and Emerald Fund and Sylvan Development Group to look at the math behind it. And what we found was there are levers that the city can pull, and actually it’s great because they’ve actually started to make those changes.

So they recently waived the transfer tax through a voter [00:30:00] measure for those kinds of projects. They’re about to implement a new tax increment financing funding source to be able to pay for the gap with the idea that these buildings, when they’re obsolete, have a really low tax basis. When they have a higher tax basis.

And so increment. Can be re and put into the project as a subsidy. And then the third thing is the inclusionary waiver on these buildings. That isn’t because we don’t think affordable housing is important, but there are options for creating some affordability at the district level instead of trying to create that requirement for every single individual building.

And there are a lot of benefits to not having, all that vacancy sitting there for a very long time. And so I think all of those tools that are now starting to come into play will hopefully start.

Jeff Wood: I also wanna ask you about the interaction between Barton Muni and downtown, because it’s a really important confluence between the two and how they are synergistic.

But also we also ask Barton Muni to do a lot [00:31:00] about, the homelessness problem. I’m wondering how we can address a lot of those things, and not just making Barton Muni responsible for all those quality of life issues, but making them actual partners and trying to revive downtown.

Sujata Srivastava: Yeah. It’s hard to talk about downtown revitalization without acknowledging this kind of fundamental problem with transit service that we’re faced with.

Because if these operators don’t get funded and we don’t solve for the fiscal cliff, we’re not gonna be able to have a thriving downtown. It’s really hard to ask people to.

One bar train an hour. So I think that there are different strategies that can be put into place on like the public realm and creating a better sense of place that will benefit some of our transit agencies and transit ridership. I think a lot of the ridership experience part of things will probably get addressed if you have a more vibrant downtown environment.

’cause I think it’s all related. I think the sense of like. When people don’t feel like taking the train. Partly it’s because maybe the train’s not full [00:32:00] enough and so you feel weird and maybe there’s that one person who is not following the rules and you’re just there with that one other person.

When you have a lot more robust ridership, it makes people feel better about being on the trains. So it’s a little bit circular.

Sujata Srivastava: The extent to which you can make downtown an environment where it’s not just about work, but also there are other reasons to be there. I think that helps get people back downtown and helps people make the trip to the office, because then they’ll go to first Thursdays, or they’re gonna go to, a gallery opening.

They’re gonna do other things downtown that aren’t just about work.

Jeff Wood: And there’s also this not a mismatch, but like you need a lot of service to bring people downtown, but you also need a lot of downtown to create the service. And so funding that is gonna be crucial. And there’s been a lot of discussion about what New York’s doing with congestion pricing, but also, I’ve seen people that aren’t really into the pricing thing.

So they’re like why don’t we, why don’t we just do what Paris did and start restricting vehicles? But then you’re gonna have a lot of arguments from folks that are like if we restrict vehicles, then we can’t bring our downtown back. So it’s like the chicken and egg problem, fighting with [00:33:00] people who have this windshield perspective, but also people who believe that we really do need all this service to support our downtown.

Sujata Srivastava: Yeah. And it’s about all the trade offs.

Jeff Wood: Yeah.

Sujata Srivastava: I would like to see some evidence-based decision making on that front. What actually does draw people. The downtown and also people, not cars, right? So you could have a lot of cars going through a place. You think about almost any highway.

Yeah. That has a ton of cars flowing through. You have a lot of

Jeff Wood: cars coming off the big bridge. It doesn’t necessarily help

Sujata Srivastava: the businesses, right? You could have lots of empty parking lots for suburban malls, but those malls are not thriving. So I think we need to dig a little bit deeper into what are the true access challenges.

And there might be, there are like some loading challenges, some small businesses may need. There are some passenger drop off pickup challenges that we might need to think about. But I also think we wanna weigh that against what actually is gonna be. Helpful to creating more foot traffic and more of a sense of place.

I think when you have too much infrastructure for the population, that’s [00:34:00] also a mismatch, right?

Sujata Srivastava: So I think sometimes the congestion is actually really helpful for retail and for getting people to stop and look around and watch what’s around them. If you can just get people to the place where they can park their car.

And then experience that. That’s maybe one set of people that isn’t being served enough right now in San Francisco. But I would like to see more evidence of what is actually needed and where the gaps are instead of just going on instinct, which I think is sometimes, that’s often what happens. Happens.

Especially when you’re talking

Jeff Wood: about cars. Squeaky wheels too. We were looking for a piece of furniture this last weekend and we walked into a shop and one of the shop owners on Valencia, he’s if you wanna come back later, it’s gonna be harder ’cause the parking is gonna be harder. And I was like, oh, it’s fine.

I walked down here, I took the bus and he is you took the bus. And I was like, yeah, we took the bus to come down here to your shop. I think a lot of times they’re surprised by that, but nobody really tells you if they took the bus or walked to the place. They just complain. They always complain about the parking.

And so I feel like I need to make it a habit of telling people when I come in their [00:35:00] shop that I came there by a bike or by walking or by transit. ’cause then they start to realize, oh, that’s my customer base too. Not just the person who’s complaining about the parking in the area.

Sujata Srivastava: It’s so true. And I think the bike lanes that they’ve put into, especially south of market, have been pretty successful.

There’s not as much on the north side of market and the financial district. Yeah. But I do think that’s another way of trying to create more accessibility. It doesn’t all have to be through cars

Jeff Wood: or transit for that matter. It can be a number of different ways. Festivals. I just read a piece by our friend Patrick Sisson, talking about how the festivals are getting more expensive, so it’s harder to put them on because the tents cost money and the permits cost money, and who’s gonna want to come sell something for a couple dollars if they have to pay so much to be a part of the system?

And so festivals are getting more expensive and harder to put on, but we wanna have more reasons for people to come downtown. Like how can we make those two ends come together?

Sujata Srivastava: Yeah. I also hear from some of the property owners and small businesses that festivals are great, but they’re not frequent enough for [00:36:00] you to be able to build your entire business model around it.

If you’re on the ground floor of a building, it’s a baseball game,

Jeff Wood: or even then, like that’s not enough probably too.

Sujata Srivastava: Yeah. So I think for me, I look at festivals as an opportunity to just signal to people that there’s a lot of arts culture and entertainment opportunities in San Francisco and to give people, like I said before, like another reason to be downtown.

But I don’t know if there a replacement for having all of those office workers and tourists. So I think it’s more about just like building, rebuilding that momentum. I think there are other things that need to happen, like those entertainment zones, for example, where you are allowed to sell alcohol and have people walk around in a particular designated area with beverages so that you can have on the street so that you can just remove some of the barriers so that if Front Street wants to do more events, it’s easier for them to do it. You could streamline the permitting so that you don’t have to go through that process every time you wanna do that in. So I, those kind of strategies are really useful.

You’re just it possible to do [00:37:00] more and to do it more frequently, but I think you have to do other things to really actually bring more of an arts culture and entertainment focus to downtown. And some of that is a hundred percent about like affordability. It’s just really hard for artists and performers to be in San Francisco, to be in the Bay Area.

Sujata Srivastava: it’s all tied together with some of the other things we’re trying to do to create more housing opportunities for folks to make it easier for people to get around so that if they do live in Oakland, but they wanna do a show in San Francisco, it’s easy for them to do that.

Jeff Wood: That’s another thing.

Housing. We have lots of people who want to live here and should live here because they wanna have access to the markets that they, or the people who will buy from them. The people do the farmer’s markets or people that do the arts shows. And I don’t know what my question is actually. I was thinking about we just need more housing opportunities.

Yeah, more housing. If we could put more housing downtown, that would mean more people walking around as well. So how do we get there?

Sujata Srivastava: Yeah. There’s a couple of things on the housing element [00:38:00] implementation. One of ’em is the 82,000 units that are the state mandated goal. A lot of our pipeline units that are primarily in the eastern neighborhoods.

Count towards that, but there are about 36,000 additional homes that need to be planned for. And it has to be realistic. Yeah. So it can’t just be like, oh, here’s a bunch of sites. We hope someday somebody wants to do housing on them. It has to be something

Jeff Wood: zoned for this. Yeah.

Sujata Srivastava: So magic, it’s been a really good opportunity for the city to think hard about how it wants to grow.

And there’s also an element of fair housing in the strategy. So affirmatively furthering fair housing rule from the Obama administration then got codified into state law. So the idea is you have to build how housing. The high resource neighborhoods. These are the wealthier neighborhoods that have not seen much development at all, primarily in the northern and western side of the city.

And that’s where a lot of the new opportunity will be. And that’s exciting because you could then see people [00:39:00] who wanna live close to Ocean Beach suddenly wanting to be in San Francisco, where maybe they weren’t as excited about being in a downtown high rise. There’s just a new set of housing opportunities.

Like we used to do this a lot in TD world, right? Yeah. What are all the different housing typologies and community typologies? They don’t all have to be super dense. They can also be this like medium density. There’s just lots of different ways that people wanna live in lots of different lifestyles that you can accommodate when you have more opportunities to do that and in lots of different neighborhoods.

And you could do multi-generational housing and there’s just a lot of other things that can happen if you open up more land for housing.

Jeff Wood: Yeah. And the mayor had Target has draft anyways has targeted those neighborhoods that have not seen or have resisted change over time.

Sujata Srivastava: Yeah. And state law gives them a lot of opportunity to some extent.

It’s not gonna be purely discretionary. The city actually has to follow through on what it said it was gonna do in it housing element [00:40:00] compliant. And if it doesn’t, then you have these kind of potentially more. Scary things that could happen with builders remedy, where you really are exempted from all of the local requirements.

Yes.

Jeff Wood: A 500 story high rise on Ocean Beach or something

Sujata Srivastava: like. Yeah. And who knows if anybody would actually build that, but I think having that as, I kind of

Jeff Wood: wanna see what happened. So so like something, because I feel like all the houses out there are all, one, two story fairytale houses that, aside from a couple of them were built outta cable cars, there’s really no like historic value to them necessarily.

A lot of the place was still sand dunes until the, like the late thirties, right? It was built for workers. I have family who built a house in outer mission in like the teens, twenties. And so all that stuff is not the oldest, but it’s also something that was built and then has never been allowed to evolve.

Having more residents and allowing more housing means basically allowing more people to live here, which I think is really important. But also younger people. One of the things that I’ve been frustrated by lately is people will talk about their favorite bars or their favorite [00:41:00] haunts or places that they used to go shutting down.

And as people age like me, get out of going out every weekend or whatever, we age into a different level of entertainment, right? And so we need the younger people to fill in the space below us so that they can enjoy the things that we enjoyed. But if those things are gone, that it makes it harder. And so allowing younger people to live in San Francisco, allowing people who actually end up having kids here to stay here.

We have a ton of amazing resources for our children. We have so many playgrounds in this area, my daughter knows every single playground within a four mile radius, it feels because she’s oh, I wanna go to Dolores Park, I wanna go to Douglas Park, I wanna go to Upper Douglas. I wanna go to this like on the daily.

And it makes me happy that we have all these resources, but I want other people to be allowed to use these resources ’cause they’re here and the housing prices make it harder for people to do that. Or they’ll leave, they’ll move, they’ll go to the East Bay, they’ll leave the state wherever else.

Sujata Srivastava: That’s exactly right. And I think we have a lot of people who wanna have an urban lifestyle [00:42:00] who don’t get heard enough. There are a lot of younger people and even, people our age who might wanna be in a denser neighborhood because then it can su support other things like transit and, oh, now I can have a co, maybe we can actually have enough density for a coffee shop to exist here.

In a lot of the neighborhoods that we’re talking about. It would probably have a pretty low walk score actually. Yeah. Because there’s just not a lot of stuff happening right around there.

Jeff Wood: Yeah, there’s a lot of areas and difference. You’d be surprised right at how little there is because if you do have more rooftops, then you can have more commerce.

When we think about rezoning and we think about new housing, we often think about like market rate housing, but there’s other opportunities potentially out there for building social housing, for building public housing. I’ve seen some really good examples like outta Montgomery County where the county has partnered with the developer and instead of taking the profits from this new development, they just make it into affordable units.

What are some of the prospects for things that aren’t market rate housing? Because I know there’s a lot of folks that live in the city who are nonbelievers in [00:43:00] market rate housing, or they just want to vary it where they provide housing for more, different folks through social or through public

Sujata Srivastava: housing.

Yeah, one of the most important things that this rezoning plan does is that it opens the opportunity for multifamily housing, which means that affordable housing is possible. So a lot of times you can’t use the state density bonus law, which allows you to build more units if you’re creating some affordable housing.

If the site is zoned for less than five units. So if you already have such restrictive zoning, you can’t even get the affordable housing, not even in a state density bonus project. And you can’t attract low income housing tax credits to finance the project if it’s too small. So there are a lot of reasons why affordable housing has had a hard time entering into the west side.

Plus on top of that top, all the nimbyism that exists, right? There’s just a lot of resistance to affordability and without some kind of state law and some local zoning to support that, you wouldn’t really have the opportunity for that [00:44:00] affordable housing, we still have a funding issue that we need to address.

So San Francisco did pass an affordable housing bond last year to cover units already in process. But to be able to really scale this up, we a challenge, particularly in this political climate, we’re.

Jeff Wood: Yeah. Overall too, it’s, there’s a lot of stuff that’s making it expensive, which is just like the cost of construction too. I learned from redoing this basement like that. It’s really expensive to just do, a thousand square feet of remodel downstairs and you could build like four houses in Texas or something for Yeah.

How much you paid, which is ridiculous when you think about it. But all that’s because labor is expensive, because you know the high housing costs, because it’s the housing theory of everything basically. It impacts everything has its fingerprints on everything. I wanna go back to Barton Muni because I think that’s a really important point and something that you all brought up a couple of times in the document.

We need to fund Barton Muni. I know that for me, as somebody who doesn’t own a car [00:45:00] in San Francisco, they’re my lifeline to get to different parts of the city and I find them very valuable, but only if the frequency’s high, right? I don’t wanna be waiting 20 minutes, 30 minutes for a bus when it should be five, 10 minutes waiting for a bus.

I’m okay waiting for five to 10 minutes, otherwise A, I’ll just walk or b, I just won’t make that trip. Those are the choices that we have. And so how do we figure out how to fund Union and BART when our funding from the federal level is obviously not coming anytime soon. And then we have all these other competing resource needs from the state locally.

1. We’ll get into, resilience funding and stuff like that later, but there’s only so much money and there’s and there’s so much need.

Sujata Srivastava: Yeah. I think it’s always really hard because everybody, when it’s budget season, everybody has their case to be made. I think what we’ve emphasized is that the state of California Underfunds Transit compared to many other states, there’s just not a lot of funding coming from the state of California to our transit operators.

And we really need to emphasize that [00:46:00] transit helps to meet California’s climate goals. It also helps the economy, right? Without transit, it’s really hard for people to get to work, for us to be able to power all of the things that we need to be powering. There’s a workforce related to the transit operations too.

So there are all these implications if our transit system fails for our economy, which I think sometimes gets lost because so many people are like I don’t take transit, but they don’t really realize that it undergirds the entire. Regional economy. We’ve also been tying it, like I said before, to the downtown recovery.

It’s really hard to ask people to come back to the office if they can’t get there because the trains are only running once an hour. And I think unfortunately, this is like the death spiral that people talk about. When you have really poor services for a public good and the quality of that public good keeps deteriorating, it makes it harder to get people to take advantage of that and to be able to make the case for continuing to fund it.

So we really need to [00:47:00] address it now because I think once you have those cuts, it’s much harder to restore the service and to restore the ridership.

Jeff Wood: And we have examples of when we have good service, people use it. The ridership on the 22, the 24 on 49, which is the van, SBRT. Those are higher than before the pandemic.

Yeah. And I notice that 22 is packed. Going through the mission and then over to the other side of the city and it’s not going to downtown. So there’s definitely a need for it. And it comes every five minutes. It’s super frequent. And so people are using it. And so that’s one of the things that I feel like, I don’t know if we sing our praises enough of the things that we’ve done right.

To let people know that this is this is creating value because we’ve generated service and then the ridership is way up. I know some of the lines going downtown aren’t as high as they were before because of the downtown lost, workers and things like that. But the rest of the system, there’s a lot of lines that are doing really well.

Yeah, and so one of the things I wish we would do more is like sing the praises of those lines and tell people, Hey look what happens when we fund service. More people take it. It creates, more access for [00:48:00] people to go buy things, to go to work, to connect with their friends. For me, I go to, Kaiser on gear using the 24 it’s like the connection between all these different things.

I also have lots of crazy funding ideas, like, why don’t we just throw stuff out like. I know that I saw yesterday that Oregon was talking about creating their own cap and trade to match what California’s done, what Washington State’s done. I know that China and other countries on in the Pacific Rim have cap and trade programs.

Like why don’t we just create a consortium and then have all of our agencies sell credits to the system. Like, why can’t we fund it that way? Or, I’ve told this story, or I’ve written this in my newsletter as well, is like, why can’t create a public utility in San Francisco? Take away pg e’s, right?

And create that, and then set up charging infrastructure for cars and then take all the profits from that and then use that from Muni. There’s all the, like these pie in the sky ideas. But I wish we could explore them and think about them and maybe you guys have actually at Spur, but there’s like a lot of little things.

Obviously the state has a role to play. Obviously there’s funding from sales taxes from ballot measures and things like that, but I wish we’d [00:49:00] explore all the options.

Sujata Srivastava: Yeah. And there was the Lyft, Uber, yeah. Tax probably voted for what? From last year. Yeah. And which would’ve passed. Yeah. If it hadn’t been for a competing ballot measure that preempted that.

But that’s an example of where I think voters would be supportive of trying to create some new funding sources for muni operations and maybe even for other things, right? Like for more bikes and more multimodal options. Yeah.

Jeff Wood: Do you have a preference on funding?

Sujata Srivastava: I think to the extent that you can really tie the, this is kinda like just a best practice.

It’s gonna sound super general because we haven’t done any deep analysis on any of these other specific sources. But when you can attach the impact of the thing. And the benefit of the thing, that’s the best kind of tax, right?

Sujata Srivastava: So for example, taxing polluters to pay for like clean energy makes a lot of sense.

So to the extent we could think about that type of nexus and what those ties might be in the transportation [00:50:00] space, congestion pricing is a really good example of that because you’re taxing the thing that is creating the impact to be able to lessen that impact and mitigate against it into the future.

So I’m a fan of those kinds of pricing models, but I know they’re very politically fraught.

Jeff Wood: Yeah, they can be. And then finally there’s resilience and climate change and all the things that the city needs to do from that perspective. We have sea level rise that is likely to impact the waterfront.

We also just have a lot of things that we can do, like electrification of buildings and stuff like that. So where are you all focused in terms of like climate change, resilience, reaching those goals?

Sujata Srivastava: We know that there have been a lot of attacks on some of the funding sources to be able to implement some of the resilience projects.

And so that is the environment that we’re in. And at the same time, we have to be able to make incremental progress on these goals. I think anytime there’s like an economic cycle that’s not favorable, people shy away from moving forward on sustainability and resilience because they’re worried. [00:51:00] But like an earthquake, a major climate event could happen at any time.

And we know from LA rebuilding is a lot more expensive than mitigating. Yeah. Or adapting. So if we don’t figure out a way as a state and as a region to put into place some of those mechanisms, we’re gonna have a bigger problem down the line. And it’s really hard to convey that. Because I think a lot of people, especially with climate stuff, it’s just something will happen and then you get people’s attention.

But when the weather is normal. There’s no big crisis on the horizon. It’s harder for people to make those difficult choices, but it’s not really something you can wait to enact. So that’s the number one principle for our resilience work, is make the incremental changes that you can make. So we, the city, just put forward a non ductile concrete ordinance that all it does is require property owners of those.

And then a voluntary retrofit. So it doesn’t mandate a retrofit, [00:52:00] but it’s one step towards understanding what the risk is and then putting in place, hopefully a financing plan so that those retrofits can happen in the future. Those kinds of things. I think we should just keep making progress on it, even though we know that it’s hard to pay for some of this stuff.

Jeff Wood: Yeah. We did this basement and we did retrofit. We did a full basically upgrade, and I didn’t realize this, but I just saw it randomly on the San Francisco website is like all that work can be, taken off of your property tax bill, right? Like you send them proof that you did it and then it’s taken off, but you have to turn it in like within 60 days or whatever of finishing your project.

And so my contractor didn’t know about it. Oh, interesting. I had, I found it. And so like maybe it’s an education program that might be helpful for letting people know that these things are available because there’s so many different ways that the city allows for you to do retrofits. ’cause they want you to do it.

They don’t want to have your house fall down

Sujata Srivastava: Exactly. In the

Jeff Wood: next earthquake. So there’s like little benefits and things that are out there, but it’s hard to know when those exist.

Sujata Srivastava: Yeah, that’s really interesting. I feel like [00:53:00] I should take that back to our team to see if there’s some like capacity building we need to be doing with contractors on this kind of stuff.

But yeah, I think that’s a really good example. I also feel like there are some things that people assume are costlier and maybe they are when you first do them, but over.

To heat pumps. That’s what we did

Jeff Wood: here. Yeah.

Sujata Srivastava: Yeah. It’s the IRL

Jeff Wood: helped a lot, but yeah.

Sujata Srivastava: And yeah, and there’s still some incentives available for that people don’t know about. And if you’re a lower income person, there are a lot of other things that you can access. So there are some resources that are available and there might be some benefits in the longer term.

Again, it’s like questioning assumptions, right? People are always like going by their gut this is gonna be too expensive and it’ll never work. But sometimes there are ways to make it work.

Jeff Wood: Yeah. And you can get value from it. Like the solar we got in just under net metering too. So there’s that.

But then also one of the reasons why I wanted to get in under net metering was because the city, basically, if you go [00:54:00] above a certain battery capacity to get more than a day of supply, you have to go through like the public utilities commission and the fire department and stuff because of the possibility of a big fire from a battery, which as we know from like the Moss landing fire, there’s some possible negative repercussions of that.

Also, if the buildings are connected, like in this neighborhood where, you know, basically my neighbor on the other side. Both of our walls are somewhat shared, right? Close together. Buildings hold San Francisco. And so they’re worried about the fire spreading if that happens. And so those things, figuring out how to make that work and allowing people to do more with the batteries than maybe they would’ve otherwise sands, like all the regulation and stuff that has to happen for it.

It was easier to go and get in before net metering too, than to try to create a system where we’d have three or four days of battery backup up if something happened. So there’s like little things like that too, I feel like that are out there.

Sujata Srivastava: Yeah, I, A lot of it is just making sure that people have the tools and the information that they need to be able to make those decisions.

Because I think most people when they have, there are a lot of people who wanna [00:55:00] do it, but they just know how. Yeah. So many people wanna put in.

Trying to remove some of the uncertainty around that. And there’s also this other issue with electrical panel upgrades that are sometimes assumed to be required if you wanna switch to a heat pump.

And what we found is that there are a lot of ways that you can actually do this with a existing electrical panels.

And so that saves people tons of money and makes it a lot more affordable and possible for people. So those are the kinds of changes that can be made that are incremental progress. It’s not gonna totally transform everything, but it’s, those are really important pieces that we can try to attack until we have more resources to do the whole scale transformation.

Yeah.

Jeff Wood: If we don’t have batteries available for people in their individual houses, it would be good to set up microgrids or some sort of like network where pg e or if we did have a public utility [00:56:00] right. It, the city was its own public utility. You could take a piece of property every 10th parcel or in a neighborhood and turn it into a battery center and then have all of the solar panels flood into that, and then give it back at night.

The onus wouldn’t have to be on every individual property owner, it could be, a network thing. And so little things like that. Totally. Just thinking about the network as a whole and the grid would be super helpful from electrifying the whole place, the whole neighborhood, the whole city and making sure that we’re more efficient and more sustainable.

So what are you excited about? What is the thing that you think that the mayor might adopt from this list of of big ideas, which obviously is gonna take more than a hundred days to do a lot of these things. Yeah. But getting the ball rolling anyways.

Sujata Srivastava: I feel like this whole governance thing is in the zeitgeist.

Everybody’s trying to figure out with scarcer resources and also there’s this whole thing about like blue cities and how they’re not run efficiently and so we. Have made it so difficult and expensive to build housing or to get things done, whether or not you [00:57:00] totally believe that argument. I do think that there are a lot of things that don’t work super well in government and that we can improve people’s lives by addressing those issues and I think the mayor is really interested in pursuing those.

So he did reorganize his office based on some of our recommendations to have. These different chiefs of different policy areas and the idea there was to create more coordination and decision making be a little bit easier when you have, 50 something departments under you. Yeah.

Jeff Wood: Sounds like 29 trans, trans agencies.

Sujata Srivastava: Yeah. So at least there’s been some receptiveness on that side. They’ve started to take on this permitting question. So I think that there’s a lot of space for us to actually do some big things and hopefully not just like tweak things at the margins or create a new section of the maze that’s just for certain kinds of projects, but like actually a whole scale reform [00:58:00] process.

Jeff Wood: Let’s see what happens. Where can folks find out more about what y’all are doing and maybe download this paper?

Sujata Srivastava: We are a membership organization, so we always encourage people who care about what we do to join spur. I’m a member and you’re a member.

Sujata Srivastava: So spur.org/join. We have membership levels for students that are very accessible.

We have everything from $35 to 10,000. So we try to create space for everyone and that allows you to come to a lot of our events. A lot of our engagement opportunities are also open to the public, even if you’re not a member. So you can come by the Urban Center and check out. We have an exhibition right now on the ground floor, on sea level rise.

A lot of events that in our space and if website all.

Right now we’re doing a lot on the topic of budgets for Oakland and for San Francisco. We’re doing a lot of work on governance, as I mentioned before, [00:59:00] downtown housing, transportation, all of it. So that’s all on our website.

Jeff Wood: And in September, there’ll be trivia night here and we’ll announce something when it gets closer, but stay tuned for that as well.

Sujata Srivastava: That’s great.

Jeff Wood: Yeah.

Sujata Srivastava: Looking forward to that.

Jeff Wood:  Awesome. Sujata, thanks for joining us. We really appreciate your time.

Sujata Srivastava: Thanks for having me, Jeff.