Meeting the Bay Area Housing Challenge: Accelerating Regionally Significant Projects

Host: Metropolitan Transportation Commission
Region: Bay Area
Openings: 1
Project Focus: Affordable Housing, Climate Adaptation, Climate Mitigation, Infrastructure Development – including Broadband, Urban Planning
Skills Needed: Research, GIS Mapping, Flexibility/Adaptability

Service Needs & Plans

This project will respond to three of the San Francisco Bay Area’s most pressing challenges: housing un-affordability, climate change, and racial exclusion. As a member of an interdisciplinary regional planning team, the selected Fellow will design an innovative approach to housing that tackles each of these challenges in an environment that fosters professional growth and opens doors to opportunity.

The Fellow will be embedded in the Regional Planning Program of the Association of Bay Area Governments (ABAG) and the Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC). Collectively, MTC and ABAG are responsible for regional land use, housing, and transportation planning for the San Francisco Bay Area, including the adoption and implementation of Plan Bay Area 2050—the region’s long-range blueprint to job and housing growth and transportation investment.
Despite the international acclaim garnered by the work of ABAG/MTC and the Bay Area’s global reputation as a place of prosperity and innovation, the work of the region’s planners is hindered by capacity constraints and both short- and long-term resilience challenges. This ranges from staffing and hiring obstacles to the ability to reimagine sometimes stagnant policy norms.

At the end of the fellowship, the Fellow will have advanced the overarching goals of expanding affordable housing opportunities in mobility- and opportunity-rich locations, integrating climate change mitigation and adaptation into transit-oriented development projects, identifying innovations in community development, and beginning to redress the legacy of racially exclusionary housing policies.

Project Description

The selected Fellow will support the design and initial implementation of the new Bay Area Priority Sites Pilot program, which is intended to transform land prioritized by local communities into complete neighborhoods with housing affordable to a diverse range of residents and a variety of local services.
The project will allow the region to pursue place-based, innovation-driven, implementation of Plan Bay Area 2050. Adopted in 2021, the Plan is the first truly integrated regional plan, with a comprehensive, interrelated suite of strategies organized into four elements: Housing, Transportation, Environment, and Economy.

In addition to Plan Bay Area 2050, 2021 saw the adoption of the Bay Area’s the Regional Housing Needs Allocation (RHNA)–an eight-year projection of the region’s housing needs for which Bay Area jurisdictions must plan. The RHNA is closely linked to the Plan and its implementation will require significantly more capacity than past RHNA cycles to address the housing, social equity, and environmental challenges that played a leading role in its design.

With the adoption of both the Plan and RHNA, ABAG and MTC have shifted gears to focus on implementation. Due to their high visibility and relatively limited previous regional implementation capacity, the Plan’s Housing Strategies have been one focus area. Supported by 2021-22 CivicSpark Fellow Corinne Tsai, the Public Land Reuse housing strategy has been further developed, with resources for implementation delivered to local jurisdictions in response to identified needs. In addition to completing the tasks identified in her Fellowship, Corinne’s work with MTC/ABAG has contributed to a pilot program concept. Although this concept builds on the knowledge sharing and capacity building that her fellowship has enabled, it is a distinct opportunity to innovate, and one that has captured the attention of the region’s policy-makers.

This concept, the Priority Sites Pilot responds to the need to concentrate regional and local collaboration around locations (“priority sites”) identified by communities to take on their share of the region’s housing needs. Rather than focus solely on housing, the pilot will take a comprehensive place-based approach, infusing resilience, housing finance, racial equity, mobility, and greenhouse gas emissions reduction into in planning and community development processes at regionally significant sites.

To help understand the potential for development in various sites to deliver multiple benefits, the Fellow will conduct spatial analysis that incorporates local knowledge from public agency staff and community members. The fellow will work with ABAG/MTC’s interdisciplinary team and with stakeholders to transform the program’s priorities and community needs into guidelines, and will then coordinate with local governments, developers, and other parties to facilitate nominations for sites and potentially for funding. The overall goal is to establish a “network” of sites that exist along a continuum from preliminary planning to actual development.

Despite the level of interest that this concept has generated, and the likelihood that it could be a model for resilient, participatory development in other parts of the state and nation, ABAG/MTC cannot shift resources away from the statutorily mandated activities that occupy the majority of permanent staff’s time. As a result, the Fellow will play a crucial role in meeting the identified capacity needs.

Desired Skills

The ideal Fellow’s primary desired skills and traits include: 1) Strong quantitative and qualitative analytical skills; 2) Spatial planning and analysis skills, including the ability, or willingness to learn, to use ArcGIS Pro and potentially other spatial analysis tools; 3) Written, oral, and graphic communication skills, including the ability, or willingness to learn, to utilize graphic design applications such as Adobe Creative Suite, and to distill multiple sources of information into presentation-quality PowerPoint presentations

Desired secondary skills include: 1) Knowledge of urban planning history in general and California in particular; 2) Understanding of racial equity principles; 3) Urban design training and/or applied skills.

Organization & Community Highlights

The Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC) and Association of Bay Area Governments (ABAG) are deeply engaged in core planning challenges facing the San Francisco Bay Area region. The agencies support the Bay Area region on a range of planning topics like housing affordability, climate resilience and emerging mobility.

Most efforts led by the agencies require strong partnerships with communities, local jurisdictions and other regional and state agencies. This partnership-based approach provides ample exposure into different levels of government and the opportunity to plan in a variety of different contexts and scales.

A key ingredient to Plan Bay Area 2050, ABAG and MTC’s Equity Platform establishes a framework for beginning to address the harms caused by urban planning and major infrastructure projects in the Bay Area, and for advancing the unfinished work of creating an equitable, diverse, and inclusive workplace.

The work led by MTC and ABAG is award-winning and is often at the cutting edge of the state of planning practice in California. This position will also provide ample exposure into the data, analytics and visualization component of regional planning. For those interested in growing technical skills, the fellowship will provide an opportunity to learn by doing with mentorship and support from a supervisor and staff across the regional planning department.

MTC/ABAG have a hybrid work environment, providing the opportunity to engage in collaborative work at the Bay Area Metro Center in downtown San Francisco, a 2016 renovated building with ample co-working space which supports the collaborative work of the agency. Whether it is in the many Metro Center conference rooms or virtual ones, fellows can expect to spend a good portion of the week problem-solving with other planners.

As a physical and virtual coordinating hub for the region, MTC/ABAG is often in the host role for regional conversations where staff and elected officials gather frequently to discuss planning challenges. Fellows can expect to participate in workshops, committee meetings, and networking events relevant to the projects they serve on as well as others that interest them.

Remote or On-Site Placement

ABAG/MTC have a hybrid work policy; the Fellow will have some flexibility in determining the frequency of in-person service, subject to agency policies. We anticipate primarily remote service will be available if desired (and primarily in-person work is available if desired), though some in-office work will be encouraged to facilitate collaboration, as well as to foster career development and network-building.

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