Are Market-Rate Units Unwelcome In San Francisco?
- Josh Stephens
- Nov 22, 2021
- 10 min read
The approval of a 495-unit, 27-story high-rise apartment building—with roughly 25% deed-restricted affordable units--by the Board of Supervisors of the City and County of San Francisco was assumed to be a sure thing in the famously expensive, housing constrained city. Except San Francisco has become equally famous for rejecting projects, including, recently, everything from a branch of a locally beloved burrito restaurant to a 13-story, 316-unit building in the Tenderloin.
The apartment building, at 469 Stevenson, met the same fate—for now—on a 8-3 vote in late October.
Developer Build, Inc. had proposed 422 market-rate and 73 deed-restricted affordable units (plus several dozen off-site affordable units) on a prime site of roughly 25,000 square feet is located one block from Market Street, the city’s main transit artery, and is surrounded by high-rises and next door to a steam plant.
Its current use: an overflow parking lot for a Nordstrom department store.
“Five-hundred units is…huge, especially considering the existing conditions of the parking lot. It’s much, much needed,” said Nicholas Foster, senior planner at the San Francisco Planning Department. The project would have represented a full 10% of the city’s housing annual production goals.
