String comparison without CASE statements?
I'm not sure that you'd call it shorter, but you could use the Logical Function IIF. From the docs,


  IIF is a shorthand way for writing a CASE expression. It evaluates the Boolean expression passed as the first argument, and then returns either of the other two arguments based on the result of the evaluation. 


Per the example,

SELECT c, iif(c='foo',1,0)
FROM ( VALUES ('foo'),('bar') ) AS t(c);