San Francisco Officials Consider Amazon’s Delivery Facility

Amazon is moving forward with a 710,000-square-foot facility in San Francisco more than five years after acquiring the land to build it.

The San Francisco Planning Department will soon begin the environmental review process for Amazon’s proposed parcel delivery facility at 900 7th Street in Showplace Square, the San Francisco Business Times reported.

Amazon purchased 6 acres from waste management company Recology in December 2020 for $202 million. Recology shut down that location the following year. Amazon filed formal plans with the city to construct an industrial building in 2021.

The project has faced regulatory hurdles along the way that have kept shovels from hitting dirt. In 2022, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors approved what was essentially a moratorium on new parcel delivery facilities, requiring developments like Amazon’s to get conditional-use authorization, or approval after additional city review, even if the site was already zoned for the proposed project. The city made the changes permanent in 2024.

Set to rise three stories, the industrial building will include 17,700 square feet of offices, approximately 3,600 square feet of ground-floor retail and 510 parking spaces for employees as well as 13,700 square feet of public open space. The site is around the corner from the California College of the Arts campus, which Vanderbilt University acquired earlier this month as part of its San Francisco satellite plans, and is a few blocks west of the growing Mission Bay neighborhood, home to large companies like OpenAI, Nvidia, Visa and Coinbase.

When complete, the delivery station is expected to “provide better service and faster delivery to customers in San Francisco while reducing delivery mileage, since many packages are currently dispatched from outside the city,” an Amazon spokesperson told the Business Times. The environmental review stage is a preliminary step in the project moving forward, and the company is planning to work in tandem with the city and community members to get it across the finish line.

The San Francisco Planning Department will convene a meeting to hear community feedback on the project on Feb. 12.— Chris Malone Méndez