Hawk Lou’s SF Mission Development Moves Forward

A controversial San Francisco housing development is moving forward on the site of a deadly fire in the Mission District.

The San Francisco Planning Commission gave developer Hawk Ling Lou the green light to move forward with the project at 2588 Mission Street in a narrow 4-3 vote, the San Francisco Chronicle reported. The 10-story, 181-unit complex will replace a three-story building burned by a fire in 2015.

The fatal blaze left one dead, six injured, and 60 tenants and 26 businesses displaced. Even though all of the surviving tenants displaced by the fire were low-income residents, only about nine percent of the units will be below market rate.

Community opponents of the project were counting on an environmental study to either force Lou to sell the property to the city for affordable housing or stop it entirely.

Lou was able to skirt a lengthy environmental review using density bonus laws for builders, the Chronicle reported.

Three of the four commissioners who voted in favor of the development hoped that Lou would sell the property to a nonprofit developer. David Blackwell, an attorney for the landlord, noted that the officials could have voted against the project under state housing laws as long as they could prove “a specific adverse impact on public health or safety.”

“At the end of the day, there is only one standard that applies here and if you are going to follow state law you have to approve this project,” Blackwell said. “The state law is crystal clear about what the standard is.”

The building remained abandoned under Lou’s ownership as two more fires damaged the structure even more. It was later deemed unsafe for habitation and demolished between 2015 and 2016.

Lou faced legal action from dozens of affected families as a result of the disaster. The tenants argued their former landlord took such poor care of the century-old building that it was only a matter of time before a fire reduced it to rubble.

Planning Commissioner Sean McGarry voted in favor of the project despite calling the site “a graveyard minus a tomb.”

“It’s scar on top of scar on top of scar,” he said. “You have fire, you have water damage, you have another fire, you have another fire on top of that. All the while the community is watching it. Basically it’s heartbreaking.”

Still, McGarry said there’s no excuse for having an eyesore of an empty lot in the neighborhood throughout the year. “We will have to move on. The community will have to move on,” he stated. “Something is going to be built there.”

— Chris Malone Méndez