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San Francisco

Battle over San Francisco’s Historic quake shacks

Developer, preservation groups at loggerheads over preservation of two buildings

48 Cortland Avenue, a surviving 1906 earthquake refugee cottage, in San Francisco, California. The fate of two quake shacks in Noe Valley is at the heart of a dispute between neighbors and a developer. (Stephen Lam/The San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images)
48 Cortland Avenue, a surviving 1906 earthquake refugee cottage, in San Francisco, California. The fate of two quake shacks in Noe Valley is at the heart of a dispute between neighbors and a developer. (Stephen Lam/The San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images)

It ain’t easy getting things built in San Francisco.

To wit, Noe Valley neighbors are battling a developer over the fate of two so-called quake shacks — built when the city was dealing with a huge homeless crisis following the 1906 earthquake, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.

Developer John Shrader has backed away from an initial plan that called for the shacks at 369 Valley Street to be torn down to make way for a large manse on the parcel. Instead, he is looking to incorporate the two structures into the design of a more modest 2,700-square-foot home, the outlet reported. Part of the plan calls for the shacks to be moved on the parcel.

“I do understand that quake shacks are by their nature historic, and we’ve changed our plans a half-dozen times, but there are people who keep opposing this project,” he told the Chronicle. “I don’t know what it is. If feels like — you know how San Francisco is just antidevelopment? Maybe that’s what’s going on here.”

Critics, meanwhile, say the quake shacks — thousands of which were hastily built to house the poor and working class who were left homeless due to the devastating earthquake —  should be left alone.

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“The history is what this is all about,” said John Blackburn, a quake shack historian, told the Chronicle. “They helped the working class have their first homes way back then, they represent the resilience of San Francisco, and today there are so very few of them left. …

“[T]hey’re really important. We have to preserve them.”

Shrader, who has tried to get a home built on the parcel for nine years, will have his plan reviewed at a hearing before the city’s Zoning Administrator sometime this month, the outlet said.

Regardless of who prevails, the outcome is almost sure to be appealed, with neighborhood and historic groups lining up to keep the shacks unscathed.

“Our view is that the shacks might not survive being moved, and even if they survive, they might not be recognizable as earthquake shacks,” Marc Norton, who lives across from the parcel, told the Chronicle. “That’s not acceptable.”

— Ted Glanzer