Priorities
The goal of Great Communities Collaborative is to ensure that the San Francisco Bay Area is made up of healthy, thriving neighborhoods that are affordable to all and linked to regional employment opportunities by a premier transit network. In order to realize this goal, GCC engages at the regional level through policy and planning to direct growth towards our cities and along our regional transit systems.
At the local level, GCC helps shape policy and plans by working with local leaders and community members to ensure that affordable housing, community-serving retail, and services like child care centers, grocery stores, and health clinics—the “must haves” for development that puts people first—locate and thrive near transit.
Once good, community-supported plans are in place, getting sustainable and equitable development projects off the ground involves complex planning and large-scale coordination and financing. GCC catalyzes financial solutions to see projects through to the finish line.
By tying housing investments to transportation and vice versa, GCC will ensure that new affordable homes will be located near transit and jobs, resulting in more equitable development and reduced greenhouse gas emissions. By centering community voice and decision-making, housing and transportation investments will serve the most vulnerable communities, low-income families and people of color, providing increased access to opportunity and more stable communities.
GCC is exploring how to leverage its strengths to accelerate efforts for climate resilience in the Bay Area. The multidisciplinary and multi-sector efforts that GCC has employed to transform regional transportation and housing for equitable transit-oriented development in the past promise to be directly applicable to helping mitigate climate threats, which will in time impact the region’s infrastructure, economy, and people – particularly low- income communities of color. This work will complement GCC’s historic efforts to mitigate climate change by reducing vehicle miles traveled (VMT) and GHG emissions.
The regional displacement crisis is a critical challenge to achieving a diverse, socially equitable, economically prosperous, and environmentally sustainable Bay Area. The displacement of low-income communities exacerbates the growing wealth and choice inequities in the Bay Area and increases greenhouse gas emissions by making it more difficult for workers, students, and parents to get around in anything but a car. GCC works with partners and coalitions to advance anti-displacement strategies and to identify solutions to the outmigration crisis.
Public land for public good means prioritizing the production of affordable housing on public land, particularly near transit, such that it ensures low-income residents who are transit’s core riders have access to transportation opportunities. As traffic to the region’s job centers worsens as a result of the housing crisis, building affordable housing on public land near transit to connect low-income residents with jobs along the Peninsula and in Silicon Valley is increasingly critical to not only meeting our regional greenhouse gas (GHG) reduction goals, but also to providing affordable and easy access to work and home.
