Bernal Heights Housing Updates Plan for Affordable Project

Bernal Heights Housing has tweaked its plans for a 70-unit affordable senior apartment complex in San Francisco’s Bernal Heights.

The development arm of locally based nonprofit Bernal Heights Neighborhood Center has revised plans for the four-and seven-story complex at 3333 Mission Street, SFYimby reported.

The senior residential project would rise next to 49 apartments developed by Bernal Heights Neighborhood Center and Bridge Housing in 1989 atop a 16,000-square-foot Big Lots store.

The project would be integrated into a three-story complex with 49 units, its 70 added units creating a combined 119 apartments. A parking garage would be demolished.

Revised plans call for concessions to reduce the building’s impact along Coleridge Street. Setbacks to the building will result in four-story facades overlooking Coleridge and Mission streets.

The 68,100-square-foot apartment building will include 42 studios and 28 one-bedroom affordable units for seniors earning between 30 percent and 120 percent of area median income. Highlights include a library, family room and lounge.

A parking garage will serve 52 cars and 74 bicycles, with the garage entrance shifted to Mission Street.

The project, designed by Los Angeles-based BAR Architects, will be sheathed in white clapboard and vertical mint tiles, with vertical windows trimmed in gray, according to renderings.

A four-level, interconnected greenway will stretch across a podium-level garden, courtyard and the public park along the south side on Coleridge Street. The park will link to a community room open to the greater Mission Bernal public.

Bernal Heights Housing filed a preliminary application in late 2023, to streamline approvals and increase density through Senate Bill 35 and the State Density Bonus program. Formal plans, submitted early last year, were approved in late October, though the revised application will require an additional “green stamp,” according to SFYimby.

Bernal Heights, zoned largely for low-density homes, contained 0.2 percent of the new homes built in San Francisco between 2016 and 2021, a San Francisco Chronicle analysis found.

In June 2023, Bernal Heights Housing bought a three-story hotel and bar that had been gutted by fire in the Mission District for $3.8 million, with plans to turn it into 35 affordable studio apartments at 3300 Mission Street, according to the San Francisco Business Times.

— Dana Bartholomew