What scale do the organizations define as their purview?
SPUR does roughly 85 percent of its work on the city level, 10 percent at the regional level and 5 percent at the state level. The SPUR Board of Directors has wrestled with the question of how to be more effective at its regional work for a long time. This debate traces its origins to SPUR’s history. In 1958, the San Francisco Planning and Housing Association divided itself into two parts: One became today’s Greenbelt Alliance, whose job was to protect the edge of the region from sprawl; the other part, a year later, become SPUR, whose job was to channel growth into the city center. At that time, San Francisco was clearly the dominant city in the region, and this division of labor between these two planning organizations was very logical. But as the Bay Area has grown into a more complex, polycentric metropolis, and as the commute shed has leaped outside the nine counties that touch the Bay, the question of how to balance SPUR’s San Francisco work with its regional planning agenda has
