Forma Development to Build Skinny Apartment Tower in SF

Forma Development Design & Management will use a state law to streamline approval for a controversial plan to build a 26-story apartment highrise in San Francisco’s Lower Nob Hill.

The locally based developer has proposed building the 36-unit tower at 777 Sutter Street, the San Francisco Chronicle reported. The 240-foot tower would dwarf the 80-foot-tall buildings along the block of the historic district.

Forma would employ Senate Bill 423, enacted this year, which fast-tracks approval for homes in cities that have fallen behind on their state-mandated housing goals. The city must accommodate 82,069 homes by 2031, of which nearly 47,000 must be affordable.

Forma would build its skinny tower on a 35-by-100 foot site of the former Fleur de Lys restaurant, which closed a decade ago and has remained vacant. A cost and timeline for the project were not disclosed.

Plans call for the top 15 floors to include a five-bedroom apartment on every floor. Of its 36 units, six will be set aside for affordable housing, three for households earning 50 percent or less of area median income, three for households earning 120 percent of API.

Roxana Macovei, project manager for Forma Development, said the deluxe unit size aims to accommodate “large and diverse households who want to live together but struggle to find suitable spaces.”

She said the site takes on a personal importance because staff from the architecture and building company were frequent patrons of the French restaurant.

“For years Fleur de Lys was a cherished part of our life, a place where we celebrated milestones and built friendships,” Macovei told the Chronicle. “This is not just another project for us. It is a part of the community where we live and care about.”

Planning Commissioner Kathrin Moore said the developer could easily fit as many as 40 units in an eight-story building, and that she was “very disappointed we could not find a more relevant project.”

The proposed tower “has very little to do with the actual challenges we have with our housing element,” Moore said during an informational commission hearing.

Because SB 423 allows the project “ministerial” approval, none among the city planners, commissioners and members of the Board of Supervisors have any power to kill the project or force the developer to make changes.

And that doesn’t sit well with neighbors worried about the building’s height and sumptuous unit size.

“Who among us would want to have Godzilla as a neighbor?” Michael Stenburg told the Planning Commission, saying the building would “transform our often bright neighborhood into an almost permanent semi-darkened cave.

“Why create a new monster building when nearby commercial buildings sit vacant and available for conversion?”

Labor groups and advocates for more housing, however, supported the project, despite the landmark status of a neighborhood where buildings built between 1906 and 1925 have between three and seven stories.

Jane Natoli, organizer for SF YIMBY, pointed out that commissioners who don’t have a chance to approve the tower are a result of decades of allowing neighbors to delay and kill housing.

“I get that change is going to be difficult,” she said. “We have had the opportunity at so many steps for so many years to address our housing shortage and we have failed again and again. That is why we are going to see things like this.”

Forma Development Design & Management, founded by Walid Mando in 2000, has managed real estate development projects from blueprints to completion, including the local office headquarters for LVMH, Sephora, PricewaterhouseCoopers and Ford’s U.S. Leasing Capital, according to its website.

— Dana Bartholomew