Construction has begun on two affordable housing apartment buildings with a combined 112 units in the Hunter’s Point Shipyard development.
The master developer of the southeastern San Francisco neighborhood, built on the site of a former Navy shipyard, is FivePoint, a spinoff of Lennar. But Jonathan Rose Companies is developing these two affordable buildings in conjunction with nonprofit Bayview Hunters Point Multipurpose Senior Services, which provides healthcare, social services and food to the area’s low-income elderly population. It also runs two senior centers in the Western Addition.
The all-electric project is expected to cost more than $130 million to build, with about half of that funding from the city’s Office of Community Infrastructure and Investment, the successor to its redevelopment agency.
In a statement, OCII Executive Director Thor Kaslofsky said the apartments would be a “crucial step” towards hitting San Francisco’s Housing Element goal to build more than 46,000 affordable housing units in the city by 2031.
The development also received nearly $6 million from the state’s newly streamlined Multifamily Finance Super Notice of Funding Availability grant approval process and 4 percent tax credits and tax-exempt bonds from the California Tax Credit Allocation Committee and the California Debt Limit Allocation Committee.
The developers applied for the tax credits and bonds three times in order to “secure the final funding allocations necessary to achieve financial feasibility,” according to Sarah White, director of development for California at Rose, which took over the project from the previous developer in 2021. It was first approved in 2017.
“Each month the project was delayed, it became more expensive to build,” she said via email, especially as construction costs and inflation rose.
Still, White said the New York-based affordable housing developer was “thrilled” to make these two as-yet-unnamed buildings its first foray into San Francisco and “help to improve the much-needed supply of affordable housing in the city.”
White said that Lennar and OCII staff did “an incredible amount of outreach” as part of the overall redevelopment of the Shipyard. As the joint venture development partner, Bayview Hunters Point Multipurpose Senior Services will provide community outreach during the pre-leasing and leasing phase, and will provide resident services onsite once the development is open, which should come in the spring of 2025.
While a previous BHPMSS low-income housing project in the Bayview had a mix of one- and two-bedroom units and was only open to seniors and people with disabilities, the new project will have between one and five bedrooms in each unit and any individuals and families that make between 30 and 50 percent of area median income can apply.
“As a native resident born on Navy Road, it is a privilege to have the opportunity for people from our community to rent a new space back in their own neighborhood,” Oscar James, board member of BHPMSS, said in a statement. “It has been a long time coming and we have been waiting for this day for over 50 years.”
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