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Published monthly · Nine Bay Area counties
The Bay Dashboard Newsletter
HOUSING · POLICY · PLACE
Future housing map
Simulate housing delivery, flood exposure, energy demand and city-level home values.
EXPERIMENTAL · MODEL v2.0
Explore a scenario. Delivery and home values are illustrative estimates, not predictions or property valuations. Public flood and energy layers provide context. How this works ↓
BAY AREA SCENARIO ATLAS
SPATIAL OUTLOOK
Bay Area · 2031
Public layers · flood, energy & sea level
Map tiles could not load. The project markers and results below remain available.
Scenario outlook
Heat shows the concentration of modeled delivery in the project sample. It is not a map of all housing.
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NOAA inundation above mean higher high water. A water-level scenario, not a prediction for the selected year; excludes storm surge and does not replace FEMA mapping.
DELIVERY OVER TIME Reported units · cumulative
ReferenceYour scenarioShading: sensitivity range
READING THE SIGNAL
THE POLICY WATCHLIST
Housing bills & policy watchlist
Enacted laws and an upcoming ballot decision, with their assumptions kept separate.
BEHIND THE ESTIMATES
Projected housing by project
| Project / city | Stage | Reported units | Reference | Scenario 2031 | Change | Record quality |
|---|
Methodology, assumptions & data limitations Read before using these estimates ↗
What the numbers mean
This is a sensitivity model applied to the dashboard’s project sample, anchored to September 18, 2026. It estimates a share of reported gross project units potentially delivered by a selected year. Completed projects, unknown unit counts, non-housing records and unknown stages are excluded. It does not identify new developable parcels, deduplicate overlapping master plans, subtract demolished homes or separate already-built phases.
City comparisons reflect uneven sample coverage. Unknown affordability is not treated as zero; affordable totals include only disclosed counts. Old records may describe homes already delivered. The model flags records missing a status date or older than two years.
A model you can inspect
Reference delivery times: proposed 6 years, review 4.5, approved 3, construction 1.5. Long-run delivery shares: 55%, 70%, 85%, 95%. Delivery = reported units × stage share × (1 − 2−years elapsed / adjusted delivery time). Elapsed years use the selected year minus 2026.
Each percentage point of financing above 6% lengthens delivery time by 10%; each cost-growth point above 3% adds 4%. Delay adds months. Policy assumptions subtract at most 18 months combined, with a minimum delivery time of 6 months. These coefficients are illustrative, not fitted to historical outcomes. The range varies delivery time and realization; it is not a statistical confidence interval.
Policy & geographic limits
Policy switches test additional acceleration relative to the reference. Legal changes may already be reflected in project records. There is no causal estimate of each bill’s effect. The bond switch assumes approval and funding beginning in 2028; neither is guaranteed.
Transit proximity uses straight-line distance to hand-curated approximate centers for a subset of Caltrain and BART stations. VTA, BRT, station entrances, service frequency, zoning, local alternative plans, hazard exclusions and parcel boundaries are not modeled.
Station references: Caltrain · BART. Bill sources are linked in each card. No automated bill-status feed is connected.
Flood, energy & home-value methodology Sources and limitations ↗
Real public layers
The FEMA snapshot queries all nine Bay Area counties. The September 19, 2026 refresh returned 13,603 hazard polygons across eight counties; no San Francisco polygons were returned by this query. Blue areas are special flood hazard areas; purple areas have a 0.2% annual flood chance. Geometry is generalized to about 3 meters; point screening can be wrong near boundaries. A location with no match may still flood. This is not an insurance determination. Check FEMA’s official map.
NOAA sea-level tiles are live public overlays, relative to mean higher high water. The chosen water level is independent of the simulated year. Blue depicts inundation depth; green depicts low-lying areas not directly connected to the ocean. NOAA viewer and caveats.
Home-value sensitivity, not appraisal
The observed baseline is the dashboard’s July 2026 citywide Zillow index. Reference value = baseline × (1 + assumed annual trend)years. The supply factor is exp(−sensitivity × extra modeled delivery / 2020 housing stock), capped between exp(−0.3) and exp(0.3). Housing stock comes from MTC / ABAG’s Census 2020 DHC H3 data. West San Jose uses citywide San Jose data.
All-area values are a 2020-stock-weighted average of city indexes where available, not Zillow’s regional index. A flood-exposed example applies your assumed discount to that index; it is not a price for a specific parcel. Interest rates influence modeled delivery only, not buyer demand directly. Gross project units, overlapping plans, stale stock, incomplete coverage and assumed elasticities limit every output. No statistical confidence is assigned to prices.
Energy context
Points show the California Energy Commission’s facilities not flagged as retired in its public snapshot, last updated June 12, 2026. Nameplate MW is not real-time generation, grid headroom, an outage forecast or a service territory. Battery MW describes power, not storage duration. No local home is assumed to be supplied by a nearby plant.
Modeled annual household demand = delivered units × your kWh/home/year assumption. Additional grid connection delay lengthens the housing-delivery assumption. Both are hypothetical. CEC data and conditions of use.
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Get involved
City boards and commissions across the Bay Area, when they meet, and which of those meetings are actually confirmed on an agenda.
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Meeting calendar
Built from each body's published schedule. A date is marked confirmed only when it appears on a real agenda; the rest are the recurring pattern the city publishes, which can move.
confirmed on an agenda recurring pattern
Upcoming hearings
Public meetings in the next 45 days where land use is decided, pulled live from each city's official agenda system. Anything matching a project this dashboard tracks is linked. Cities usually post agendas about a week ahead, so a meeting can appear here before its agenda does.
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Build your get-involved plan
Pick what you care about and how much time you actually have - we'll turn it into an ordered, specific plan: which meeting to watch, which board to apply to, and which nearby project to comment on first.
1. What do you care about? 2. How much time do you have?Summarize recent meetings
Pick a city and get a plain-language summary of what its council, planning commission, and related boards actually did in the last 30 days - built from each city's own published agendas and minutes, not a general web search.
Housing
Development
Transportation
Meetings referenced
Statistics
Housing costs and development activity across the Bay Area, with your city marked. Market figures are citywide indexes from Zillow's public research data; pipeline figures are counted from the records in this dashboard.
Resources
Every official tool and source this tracker draws from or links out to for Sunnyvale - the real GIS maps, meeting calendars, board applications, and source reports, in one place.
Housing
Recent News
Where these are
How a housing project actually gets built
Every project in this tracker moves through the same five stages, no matter which city: Proposed (an early filing, sometimes just a preliminary application), Under Review (staff and commissions checking it against zoning, environmental rules, and the general plan), Approved (a Planning Commission or City Council vote), Under Construction, and Completed. A project can sit in "Under Review" for years, or move in months, depending on its complexity and how much community input it draws.
Why so many projects mention "SB330," "Builder's Remedy," or "SB35"
California passed a series of state laws over the last decade specifically to speed up housing approval when cities aren't producing enough of it. SB330 (the Housing Crisis Act of 2019) limits how much a city can downzone or delay housing once an application is filed. SB35 lets qualifying affordable projects skip most discretionary review entirely if a city hasn't met its state-mandated housing targets. The Builder's Remedy is the most aggressive tool: if a city's Housing Element (its state-mandated housing plan) is found legally non-compliant, developers can propose projects that ignore local zoning almost entirely, as long a share of the units are affordable. Cupertino's wave of Builder's Remedy filings in this tracker exists because its Housing Element was found non-compliant for a period.
What "BMR" and affordability numbers actually mean
BMR stands for Below Market Rate - units legally restricted to rent or sell at a set fraction of the area's median income, rather than whatever the market would otherwise charge. Cities usually require a percentage of units in larger projects to be BMR, though the exact percentage and income tiers vary by city and by which state law a project is using. A "100% affordable" project has no market-rate units at all, usually built by a nonprofit or public housing authority rather than a private developer.
Where to actually weigh in
Housing projects are decided by each city's Planning Commission first, with City Council as the final word on appeals. See the Get Involved section below for exact meeting schedules and how to submit public comment on a specific project.
The laws behind these records
Most of what happens on this page is driven by a handful of state laws. Each one links to its own text.
Developments
Commercial, industrial, office, hotel, and retail projects - separate from housing.
Recent News
Where these are
What counts as a "development" here, versus housing
This page covers everything that isn't primarily housing: office and R&D campuses, hotels, retail centers, industrial and storage buildings, and mixed-use projects where the commercial portion is the main story. Mixed-use projects with a significant residential component are tracked under Housing instead - a project can appear in both places if it genuinely has both.
Why office/R&D projects matter to the housing conversation
The South Bay's jobs-to-housing imbalance is a direct driver of the housing pressure tracked elsewhere on this site. Every new office or R&D campus approved without matching new housing adds workers who need somewhere to live, in cities that are already behind on state housing targets. Some cities now require a "jobs-housing linkage fee" or a Development Agreement tying commercial approvals to public benefits - watch for these terms in a project's notes.
CEQA and why some projects cite a "Notice of Exemption"
Any discretionary project in California must clear the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), either through a full Environmental Impact Report (EIR) or by qualifying for an exemption. Infill projects on already-developed sites within city limits often qualify for a "Class 32" categorical exemption, which is why you'll see "Notice of Exemption" instead of a multi-year EIR process on several projects in this tracker - it's a legitimate, common path, not a shortcut around review.
Development Agreements
For large projects, cities sometimes negotiate a formal Development Agreement - a contract that locks in the project's entitlements for a set number of years (often 20-30) in exchange for public benefits like parkland, infrastructure funding, or affordable housing. Google's Middlefield Park and North Bayshore master plans in Mountain View are both governed by long-term Development Agreements.
The laws behind these records
Most of what happens on this page is driven by a handful of state laws. Each one links to its own text.
Transportation
Recent News
Where these are
The kinds of projects tracked here
Transportation covers road and highway changes, Caltrain and light rail infrastructure, bike and pedestrian improvements, and grade separations (where a road or path is rerouted above or below train tracks to remove a dangerous crossing). Unlike housing, most of these are public works projects run directly by the city or a regional agency, not private developers.
Why "VMT" replaced "LOS" in project reviews
Until 2020, California cities measured a project's traffic impact using LOS (Level of Service) - essentially, how much a project slowed down car traffic at nearby intersections. State law (SB743) replaced this with VMT (Vehicle Miles Traveled) - how many total miles of driving a project generates. The shift matters: LOS penalized dense, walkable, transit-served projects for "causing congestion," while VMT rewards them for reducing how much people have to drive. A project near a Caltrain station now often has an easier environmental review specifically because of this change.
Grade separations: why they cost hundreds of millions
Every at-grade Caltrain crossing (where a road crosses the tracks directly, with gates and lights) is a safety and traffic bottleneck as Caltrain moves toward faster, more frequent electrified service. Grade separation projects - lowering the road, raising the tracks, or building an under/overpass - routinely cost $200-700 million per crossing and take a decade or more from first study to completion, which is why projects like Sunnyvale's Caltrain Grade Separation move so slowly compared to a typical development.
Vision Zero
Many cities in this tracker have adopted Vision Zero - a policy goal of eliminating all traffic deaths and severe injuries by a target year, usually through street redesigns (protected bike lanes, shorter crossings, slower design speeds) rather than relying on driver behavior alone. Bicycle and pedestrian projects tracked here are often justified directly by Vision Zero commitments.
The laws behind these records
Most of what happens on this page is driven by a handful of state laws. Each one links to its own text.
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Adding a password carries your saved projects, timeline and reminders to any device you sign in on. Email is optional even then.
Overview
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Your name is your account here. Everything on the site works under it, with nothing else to set up. It is kept on this device, so saved items, your timeline and your preferences live in this browser and clearing browser data removes them. Two things need more than a name: reaching your account from another device, and anything sent to you by email. Both need a password, and an email address needs a name you chose rather than the one we picked.
That password is a lock on this browser, for a shared computer: it stops someone else here opening your saved items. It does not travel anywhere and it does not enable email. "Add a password" below is the one that does, and it carries the same saved items over.
Next hearings in your city
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Latest in your city
Boards
The bodies that actually decide land use where you live - when they meet, what they control, and how to join them.
Who decides
Boards you can join
Official board pages
Your get-involved plan
A concrete plan sized to the time you actually have, built from your city's real meeting schedule and open seats.
Drafting tools
Working drafts you can edit and send. Each one is assembled from your city's real record - the body that decides, where it meets, and the project you pick. The argument is yours to write; the procedural scaffolding is filled in for you.
These go into the draft exactly as you type them. Nothing is written for you.
Boards weight comments from people who live in the city. Leave blank if you'd rather not.
Stay updated with email summaries
A plain-English recap of what is being built, what changed, and which meetings decide it. Quiet weeks still send - the point is to keep you current, not only to alert you.
Your city's news comes right after anything you've starred, ahead of the rest of the Bay Area.
Topics to include
Your starred projects, boards and articles are always included, whatever you pick here.
What a briefing contains
- What you're following - every starred project, board and article, with anything that changed marked and sorted first.
- In your city - housing, transportation, other development, news, and who decides it.
- Around the Bay Area - projects that moved elsewhere, plus regional coverage.
- Official links - your city's own planning, permit and GIS pages.
Nothing in the briefing is model-generated. Status text is quoted from the record, and the summary line is assembled from counts.
Reminders
Meeting schedules and plans you asked to keep. Send them to yourself now, or let them ride along with your regular briefing.
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Saved resources
Official tools, maps, board pages and meeting calendars you've starred, plus the full set for your city.
Starred by you
All official links for your city
Type
Chat history
Answers you saved from the planning assistant, with the official sources each one cited. Saved answers are yours alone and are never used to train anything.
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Saved
Everything you've starred, grouped by type. Starred items always lead your email briefing.
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Visible only to the accounts listed in this server's ADMIN_USERNAMES. Nobody else can reach this panel or the API routes behind it.
Signups by city
Email frequency
Recent users
Resource bank
Every record this site holds, searchable at once - projects, news, commissions, official documents, statistics and housing targets, across all 101 Bay Area cities and towns.
Type
City
Santa Clara County · Public planning records
About this dashboard
This site collects what is being built across the Bay Area and when the meetings that decide it take place. All of it is public information already. It is spread across city and county websites, a state housing portal and several meeting systems, so it is gathered here in one place.
Where the data comes from
Projects come from each city's development records: GIS feature services, published pipelines and posted project lists. Hearings come from city Legistar feeds. Housing target progress comes from the California Department of Housing and Community Development's 6th Cycle RHNA Progress Report. Home values and rents come from Zillow's public research data. Commute times, income, tenure and housing age come from the Census Bureau's American Community Survey. News comes from local newsrooms and links to the publisher.
How records are handled
Project statuses are quoted from the source. Counts are worked out from those records. Nothing on this site is written for you.
Directory profiles have official resources, meeting links and Census estimates. They show no project totals until a verified inventory has been imported. An empty register is a coverage gap, not evidence that no development is underway.
How current it is
Statuses lag their source. A city that updates its pipeline quarterly can show a status here that is up to a quarter old, and a project can change between the last refresh and now. Each project shows the city's own file number and links to the register it came from, where that number can be looked up.
What it covers
All 101 incorporated cities and towns across the nine Bay Area counties, plus a separate West San Jose neighborhood profile. Every area has official resources, a meeting directory and a local photograph. Project inventories are researched samples; newer directory profiles provide Census statistics and official sources while their project inventory is being assembled.
Ask a Question
Ask about projects, housing, transportation, development status, public meetings, or how to participate. The assistant can be configured to answer from this dashboard's records and any additional civic data you connect on the server.
Ask a civic-planning question. I can use the selected city's project records, planning details, and participation resources when the backend is connected.
Enter to send · Shift+Enter for a new line · Answers should be verified against official city records for time-sensitive decisions.
Map & propositions
Click a marker to open its proposition. Sort by category, or search by address/applicant.
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