SSV Building a Sustainable Community Development Framework

SSV’s steadfast vision of a healthy, equitable and clean energy Bay Area, with specialized focus areas of Water, Air Quality, Mobility and Decarbonization, also includes advocating for sustainable communities and increased civic engagement.

SSV is partnering/collaborating with the San Jose State University Sbona Honors Program  to create a sustainable community development framework.  This will be a systematic multi-contributor, multi-benefit  research effort on commercial and multi-family housing development projects throughout the Bay Area. These types of development projects are among the longest-lasting infrastructure decisions a community can make. Thus, the goal is to identify sustainable community design best practices and provide citizens with tools to evaluate and comment on projects throughout the government and public evaluation process. This supports a broader SSV vision for increasing citizen engagement and elevating diverse voices as sustainable communities are being planned and developed. 

Phase I of SBONA focuses on defining the best practice areas for analysis, identifying allied organizations with the relevant domain expertise, and agreeing upon benchmarks for measuring each best practice dimension as well as baseline measurements of acceptable and ideal design.  

Phase II involves developing workflows for identifying and tracking development projects, analyzing and commenting on projects as they move through the concept and design phases, providing property developers, citizens, and platform administrators with portals to input new information and changes.

Phase III will entail outreach to targeted stakeholders (city councils, developers), communities, and local media to educate them about the platform and how it can be utilized to achieve the shared goal of sustainable communities. 

Phase IV covers analytical integration from website, newsletter and social media.

Key deliverables 

• A systematic process for evaluating  commercial development and multi-housing projects using a sustainable communities lens 
• Application of the Sustainable Communities Lens to four development projects, engaging community, government, and development stakeholders
• Software platform for managing workflows and performance analysis.

Under the leadership of SJSU Professors Heidi Livingston Eisips and Adina Polmanteer of the San Jose State University Sbona Honors Program, SJSU students are helping build out phases 1A and 1B during the 2021-2022 school term.