MARCUS’ Priorities
BIG STRUCTURAL, BAY AREA CHANGE
The major issues affecting the lives of working families and households in San Francisco are not limited to just the city. Stagnating wages, unaffordable housing, worsening impacts from climate change - these are all larger-scale issues that require bigger-picture thinking.
This is what we need and what we need immediately:
Planning at the regional level. There are dozens of towns and cities throughout the Bay Area and they act as if their decisions have no impact on places around them. The job centers of Palo Alto and Cupertino (and, yes, San Francisco) actively courted tens of thousands of jobs in just the last decade alone, but have never built the housing needed to accommodate those new workers. What is the effect? Displacement as a result of unbridled gentrification occurring in cities like Oakland and San Jose, just to name a few, pushing households of lower incomes into one-way UHaul trucks out to Central Valley towns and cities. Yet the droves of displaced residents are still working here - if they are at all - meaning their commutes into the Bay Area’s urban core are longer, more grueling, and the traffic on vital arterial freeways into cities gets worse. In effect, the cost of living climbs higher and higher, the climate warms ever more as a consequence of longer vehicle miles traveled, and the families who once contributed to the cultural vitality of the Bay Area can no longer call it home. As it stand there are countless planning agencies and commissions for each individual Bay Area municipality making decisions in a vacuum. And while the state assigns a target level of housing each of those municipalities must build within a set period of time through what is called a Regional Housing Need Allocation, Bay Area towns consistently fall short of these state-mandated goals. Almost always on purpose. This must end. Land use planning needs to occur on the regional level. We have what is called the Association of Bay Area Governments but its stacked with elected officials. Land use and housing construction allocation mandates needs to be a ministerial process - done by technocrats who live and breathe cold hard statistics and economics.
Seamless, connected Bay Area transit. Just as the Bay Area’s cities have their own isolated planning agencies, they also have a mess of overlapping, ineffectual transit agencies. To get from San Francisco to Oakland, one has the option of using BART or one of several ferries or one of several AC Transit bus lines to other East Bay towns. None of the systems’ schedules line up for easy of use and transfer; for the few fare transfer agreements that exist, the rates are wildly variable and illogical; and fares, while integrated through our touchless fare card Clipper, are not amenable to working people with prices varying with a near malicious level of unaffordability. We need all transit agencies operating under one umbrella organization, the existing Metropolitan Transportation Commission, but with the legal power and teeth to integrate fares, coordinate schedules along core routes and services, and ensure the greatest amount of investment is put into maintaining the urban core of transit services instead of constantly pumping money into expanding rail to farther out suburbs as BART has in the past.
A region-wide plan to implement a localized Green New Deal. Taking climate change seriously doesn’t just mean putting the onus for responsible choices on individual consumers. We cannot bamboo straw our way out of rising sea levels and warming temperatures that result in worse wildfires, orange skies, and fewer rain days. We have an existing Bay Area agency of stakeholders and elected officials called the Bay Area Air Quality Management District, but it needs teeth. We need BAAQMD to have the authority to enforce Spare the Air Days, limit traffic, and unilaterally raise bridge tolls, all while having the funding to make transit use free for everyone and give grants to cities to build roads that are thinner for cars and safe for pedestrians and bicyclists. With 40% of carbon emissions coming from the transportation sector (read: single-occupancy private automobile use, the bulk majority of which occurs over short distances), we need to develop a region-wide plan to make getting around easier and more affordable while ensuring disadvantaged communities are not left out.
We can’t think of our problems are ours alone. Working with regional and state partners is essential to going after the roots of our problems.