Catholic Order Lists SF Nursing Home Site for $59 Million

Little Sisters of the Poor has a big real estate proposition in San Francisco: a 6-acre redevelopment opportunity in Inner Richmond for $58.5 million.

The France-based Roman Catholic order has listed its former nursing home and grounds at 300 Lake Street, near Presidio Terrace, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.

The mendicant order decided to sell its land for the first time in more than a century after closing its St. Anne’s Home last month, and relocating its 59 residents. The Little Sisters of the Poor has been caring for the elderly in San Francisco since 1901.

A mid-May deadline date to submit bids was not disclosed. Developers, including the city of San Francisco, are salivating.

“All the major housing developers in San Francisco have looked at it,” an unidentified “market participant” familiar with the bidding process told the newspaper.

The property includes a 120,000-square-foot senior facility, built in 1979, plus a 4,500-square-foot carriage house surrounded by a neighborhood of tree-lined streets and multimillion-dollar homes.

Sources said the city looked at the site with the intent of potentially buying it for homeless housing, but will not acquire the property.

The former nursing home is located within the zone of a sweeping rezoning plan — a draft of which was released by Mayor Daniel Lurie last month — that allows taller buildings along transit routes from the Marina to the Sunset and Richmond districts.

It’s an effort to accommodate 36,000 new housing units in a part of town that’s had little construction for half a century, according to the Chronicle. The city has a state-mandated housing goal of building 82,000 homes by 2031.

While much of the neighborhood immediately surrounding the former nursing home has been spared from the rezoning — the current 40-foot height limits there will remain intact — the property could see its allowable development height more than double to 85 feet.

One local developer said his firm has had “discussions with groups” involved in its sale around “trying to repurpose the existing building.”

“You could do something more community-serving on Lake Street, and then you do single-family or townhomes on the back of the site,” the unidentified developer told the Chronicle.

“You could scrape the whole site and build 350 units,” the developer added. “I’ve heard that you could do something maybe a little more dense on Lake Street, like 150 units, and then do 30 to 35 single-family homes on the back of the site.”

The “direction is clear — the city wants to see multifamily housing” at 300 Lake and other parcels it has identified for upzoning,” another insider told the Chronicle.

“The site presents a unique opportunity with the capacity for a significant amount of housing,” he said. “The city’s housing element and our proposed rezoning would prefer a mid-rise multifamily project there.”

— Dana Bartholomew