The fire at the Ghost Ship artists collective in the Fruitvale district was the most lethal fire in Oakland’s history and the worst in the state since the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire. How can property owners and the City of Oakland make places like the Ghost Ship safe without making them so expensive that they cease to be affordable?

What kinds of changes can we make to encourage more people to use transit more of the time? The Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority will be asking questions like this as it launches the Next Network, a system-wide redesign intended to grow ridership, improve its fiscal footing and serve BART.

Bay Area voters have approved more than $10 billion in new transportation funding. The majority of the new revenue is for projects and goals SPUR supports, but if we have learned anything over decades of being involved in urban transportation, it’s that well-intentioned and well-funded projects can still fail if we don’t get the details right. Here’s what we’ll be watching closely.

Last week San Jose became the latest Bay Area city to update its in-law unit ordinances to better serve the need for housing solutions. Once illegal in many cities, this simple way to add more housing — create an additional unit in the backyard, basement, attic or garage — has become a welcome tool in the fight to make urban housing affordable.

The latest update to Plan Bay Area is now underway — and its findings have revealed some troubling flaws in the planning tools we have for managing our region’s biggest challenges: making housing affordable and maintaining our transportation infrastructure. Now that these issues have been made apparent, it’s time to ask what we should be doing differently.