Bay Area Regional Livability Footprint
Bay Area Council
San Francisco Bay Area, California July 2000 to October 2000
The Livability Footprint Project was cooperatively initiated by Bay Area agencies involved in transportation
planning, environmental protection and local government coordination, and the Bay Area Alliance for Sustainable
Communities, to build consensus among Bay Area residents around strategies for accommodating growth over
the next twenty years while still maintaining the region’s unique quality of life. Such a process can only be
completed effectively if people participating in the consensus-building process have access to critical types of
information about the region including environmental conditions and economic and demographic trends, and a
clear definition of the critical social equity issues created by ongoing growth in the region. Over a two-year period,
as the Bay Area Alliance was developing its document “E-Vision the Future,” the group also identified a number
of initial data sets considered critical to informing this consensus-building process.

Strategic Economics was retained to manage a technical team of experts, including several other consultants, to
compile initial data sets and assist in designing a process for consensus building. Most of the data were mapped
using a geographic information system (GIS). The consultant members of the technical team also designed a
“game” that participants in a public workshop could play to illustrate their ideas about where and how the region
should grow over the next two decades. This game takes into account spatial placement of new development, the
types of housing units that would be built by product type and price, where and what types of jobs would be
created, and what land should be set aside or protected as open space. Other key members of the technical
team included faculty from the University of California, Berkeley and University of California, Santa Cruz, as well
as staff from U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, U.S. Geological Survey, U.S. Department of
Commerce, Partners for Regional Livability, the Sierra Club, the Urban Habitat Program, and the Bay Area
Transportation and Land Use Coalition.