A long-promised affordable housing project in San Francisco’s Tenderloin has been kicked down the road again.
Rather than building new homes at the site, the Mayor’s Office of Housing and Community Development is opting to grant a five-year lease extension for La Cocina’s incubator kitchen at 101 Hyde Street in the Tenderloin, Mission Local reported. In keeping La Cocina at 101 Hyde, the city will purportedly save hundreds of thousands of dollars in vacancy fees amid a difficult funding climate.
The 96-year-old building was once a post office that was meant to be transformed into affordable housing. Shorenstein bought the property, at 101 Hyde Street, in 2016 for $12.5 million in an agreement with the city to build affordable residences and donate the building back to the local government. The proposal called for 85 income-restricted units.
“There was a small minority in the neighborhood who thought we could do better on the amount of affordable housing,” Meg Spriggs of Shoreinstein’s multifamily division told the San Francisco Business Times in 2016. “101 Hyde Street had been on the market. [Tenderloin Neighborhood Development Corporation] had their eyes on it, but really wasn’t able to be competitive. They suggested we buy that property and dedicate it to the city.” The building is owned by the City and County of San Francisco, per property records.
In 2021, La Cocina, a nonprofit geared toward serving women, immigrants and people of color aspiring to be food and restaurant entrepreneurs, turned the building into a public food hall in a $6 million revamp. The organization served $5 meals with the hope of reviving a blighted block plagued with drug activity. But with downtown workers slow to return to work post-pandemic, the nonprofit shuttered the food hall in 2023 and reverted to running a private commissary kitchen similar to its location in the Mission District.
“This is not a matter of prioritization, it’s about feasibility,” Anne Stanley, a spokesperson for the housing office, said in a statement, per Mission Local. “Given limited resources and the competitive nature of affordable housing finance, we must be strategic and responsible stewards of public funds.”
Critics in the Tenderloin see it differently, as the neighborhood has been promised affordable housing at the site for a decade.
“They got the money for having that building based on that premise that they were going to be providing that ongoing benefit for the community,” Kasey Rios Asberry, a community advocate who once helped create La Cocina’s now-closed public street space, told Mission Local. “Most of the time, the metal doors are down. It’s again a blighted space on the sidewalk instead of a free flowing contributor to public health.”
Ultimately, the lack of visitor traffic proved too high of a hurdle for La Cocina to overcome.
“We were trying to create economic opportunities for working-class immigrant and women-of-color small businesses while providing a welcoming space for the Tenderloin,” La Cocina spokesperson Aniela Valtierra told Mission Local. “Places like the Marketplace can’t survive on admiration alone. They require consistent patronage and support.”