A year ago, San Francisco rejected nearly 500 homes planned for a parking lot in South of Market, prompting a state probe into the city’s glacial housing approvals. Now the city has turned down homes on another parking lot a block away.
The Planning Commission has nixed a proposal to build 57 studio apartments on a skinny lot at 1010 Mission Street, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.
There had been no letters of opposition. No calls to the district supervisor’s office. There was only the last-minute campaign from six neighborhood nonprofit workers who said the project’s 49 market rate units would be too small and costly for local families.
Supervisor Matt Dorsey, who represents South of Market, called the 3-2 commission vote a “political stunt,” and “galling.“
“This isn’t good government. It’s anti-housing gamesmanship. It’s why San Franciscans are losing confidence in their local government,” Dorsey told the Chronicle. “It’s why the state Department of Housing and Community Development is investigating our processes. The matter should have been continued.”
The vote, by an undersized five-member commission, comes after the California Department of Housing and Community Development launched its first “housing policy and practice review” into why San Francisco has the slowest housing approvals of any city in the state.
The state investigation was spurred by a Board of Supervisors’ decision last October to reject 495 apartments on a Nordstrom valet parking lot at 469 Stevenson Street, a block from the Mission Street lot.
The Mission Street project called for a nine-story building with 20,170 square feet to be wedged between two mixed-use buildings and constructed atop a parking lot big enough for 15 cars. Of its 57 single-room occupancy units, eight would have been set aside as affordable.
The project applicant, 1010 Mission Street LLC, is led by James Nunemacher, according to California Secretary of State records. Nunemacher is the founder of Vanguard Properties, a real estate firm based in San Francisco.
Jeff Cretan, spokesman for Mayor London Breed, said the commission vote should have been delayed a month or so to give the developer a chance to address neighbors’ concerns and allow a full seven-member commission to vote on the project.
It was the three members of the commission appointed by the Board of Supervisors — Kathrin Moore, Gabriella Ruiz Martinez and Theresa Imperial — who voted to kill the project rather than continue it until the body was at full strength.
The absence of two commissioners should not have been seized upon “as an opportunity to kill a housing project,” Cretan said.
At the planning commission hearing, SoMa activists decried the trend of squeezing as many small units as possible into infill buildings.
“We do not need any more tiny, expensive units,” said P.J. Eugenio of the South of Market Community Action Network, which has sued to stop multiple market rate housing projects in the neighborhood.
Raquel Redondiez, executive director of SoMa Pilipinas, said that the city planners should “respond to the reality that there is an over abundance of tiny studios and one bedrooms and these do not fit the needs of families.”
— Dana Bartholomew
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