Editor’s note: As San Francisco moves to allow more housing density across much of the city, The Frisc is examining what’s in store for a handful of neighborhoods. We previously visited the Haight-Ashbury, Outer Sunset, and Tenderloin.
Sleepy Glen Park has missed out on San Francisco’s housing wars, and that seems to be the way many longtime residents like it. But the neighborhood’s idyllic recess could be coming to an end.
The city’s new proposed zoning map could make way for buildings up to eight stories in the blocks around the neighborhood’s core, which includes a BART station.
“This is the first time I’m hearing about any of this,” says Zoel Fages, owner of the Perch gift shop on Chenery Street since 2008. Based on the current proposal, Fages’ block would be bumped up to a six-story limit, with eight-story parcels right across the way. The shop owner is skeptical. “I honestly don’t think any of that would happen on these blocks,” says Fages. “What people love about this neighborhood is its village-like vibe.”
If a developer takes up the challenge, Fages hopes neighborhood character is an objection opponents could wield. But SF’s new state-mandated housing blueprint calls for 82,000 new homes in the next decade, and more than half must be affordable.
Neighborhood character and other tactics and tools are no longer allowed as reasons to block or delay housing. Some of those homes will be part of larger build-outs in areas like Treasure Island and the Central Waterfront, but many must fit into neighborhoods like Glen Park. If legislators don’t make a real effort to allow more density, state regulators could bring harsh penalties.
For decades, most of Glen Park has been limited to single-family housing, the least dense footprint in the city. The area just around the BART station allows “small-scale neighborhood-serving commercial uses,” with special rules limiting height, bulk, and open space.
The new map would open the heart of the neighborhood to new development for the first time in decades. There’s no guarantee developers will jump in, but the specter of change is enough to haunt some folks.
“What they’re planning there would be fucking terrible,” says Sean Kelly, co-owner of the Glen Park Station bar and lifelong Glen Park resident. He acknowledges that more homes would mean more customers for neighborhood businesses, many of which struggled through the pandemic. “I’m all for more housing, maybe four stories would be good,” but “eight stories is wild.” (Kelly is also a realtor.)
Between 2016 and 2022, Glen Park’s population grew by about 500 people to 8,700, according to the most recent census data. Housing stock in the neighborhood is just over 3,800 units, with almost no new homes added in the past decade. Only 12 percent of homes are in buildings of five or more units.
The neighborhood is 70 percent white, with a median household income over $121,500, and the city’s planning department estimates that some 64 percent of residents own a home, with most moving in back in the 1990s.
It takes a village
Spend time talking to residents here, and you’ll soon hear about quaint vibes and closeness to nature in the sprawling Glen Canyon Park. Even SF’s Office of Economic & Workforce Development refers to Glen Park as a “village.”
“It’s a place to get away from the hustle and bustle downtown and enjoy the blue sky and green space,” says neighborhood historian Evelyn Rose. “A lot of people don’t realize there’s 70 acres of open space right in the heart of Glen Canyon. People who’ve lived in SF all their lives [have] had no idea this was here.”
Rose frets that new construction may spoil the atmosphere. “Putting eight story buildings around Diamond Street is basically taking the village out of it,” Rose says. “It’s like being dissected and extracted.”
Although Glen Park may seem remote, it meets most, if not all, the criteria that state regulators and city planners consider prime territory for more density in SF — a “housing opportunity area,” in SF Planning parlance, that needs to build its fair share of much-needed housing.
It’s well-resourced — that is, wealthy with lots of shops, restaurants, and other amenities — it’s walkable, and it’s served by major transit lines, which is a key to encourage residents to stay out of private vehicles.
Organizer Minnie Straub Baxter rallied neighbors against the Glen Park freeway plan with the declaration, ‘Only God created this beautiful neighborhood in which we live — what man dares destroy it?’
Transit isn’t just a perk of the neighborhood, however. It’s the keystone to adding more density there. In the heart of its commercial hub sits a landmark BART station, concrete and Brutalist, and its property includes the equivalent of San Francisco gold: a parking lot. It’s about as big a development no-brainer as you can get in SF.
Some folks agree that a denser Glen Park is a better Glen Park. Like Kelly, Tony Jerez, manager of the Critter Fritters pet food store on Chenery Street, says more homes mean more customers. But he’s also fine with some blocks going up to eight stories: “People who live on the hill worry it’ll make it ugly, but we’ve gotta move with the times. Why should all the buildings go downtown?”
Jerez attributes the density push to State Senator Scott Wiener, which is true: Wiener is a key architect of the state’s raft of laws to address California’s housing crisis. Before going to Sacramento, Wiener was Glen Park’s representative on the SF Board of Supervisors for eight years.
Resident and self-described “Glen Park urbanist” Mike Schiraldi is making the same push locally. In 2022 he organized a campaign to encourage planners to upzone the eastern part of the neighborhood in the city’s new Housing Element — the blueprint for 82,000 new homes approved in early 2023. (No luck so far: his part of Glen Park, called the Fairmount Tract, remains unchanged on the latest map.)
“I’d like my daughter to have more kids to play with, the teachers at her school to be able to live closer to where they work, and our merchants to have more business,” Schiraldi tells The Frisc via email. “Where could anyone possibly find a better place for new housing than a transit hub in a city full of opportunity with moderate climate and excellent walkability?”
‘A gem subdivision’
Glen Park started as a series of dairy ranches in the mid-1800s, according to historian Evelyn Rose. By the end of the century, developers were pitching the still-obscure area as a “gem subdivision of the Mission,” but it wasn’t until survivors of the 1906 earthquake relocated there that a real neighborhood started to sprout.
Like the Haight-Ashbury, Glen Park made its bones by resisting a bid to put a new freeway through in the 1950s and slice the neighborhood in half. Organizer Minnie Straub Baxter rallied neighbors against the plan with the declaration, “Only God created this beautiful neighborhood in which we live — what man dares destroy it?”
Theological implications aside, it was a stirring message, and the freeway never manifested.
After earning its obscurity, Glen Park’s inclusion in the BART system a few years later seems somewhat surprising. The station — unique in BART’s network as a brutalist architectural gem — now serves as the center of housing gravity for the neighborhood. Housing opponents could blame its presence for inviting density. More housing there seems inevitable, although not imminent.
BART just published a new plan with tentative steps to build housing on the property, including feasibility studies, utility easements, and neighborhood outreach. Thanks to a 2018 law, BART now has carte blanche to develop its own property and has aggressive plans across the Bay Area.
With most SF stations underground and already with dense development above, Glen Park is one of its few prospects in San Francisco. Specifically, BART has its eyes on the 55-space drive-and-ride parking lot across the street from the station. “The city does not expect BART rider replacement parking on-site due to the parcel sizes and low number of spaces,” the plan notes.
But it’s not a near-term prospect. BART is strapped for riders and cash, and the original timeline to finish housing by 2030 has been bumped to an indefinite window — 2034 and beyond, the report says — as the transit system concentrates on housing plans already further along like in North Berkeley.
Thanks to SF’s new map, there’s also room to build within the station’s footprint itself. But the lot seems to be something both housing backers and skeptics can agree upon. “I don’t even know the rules for parking there,” says bar owner Kelly. “That would be a fine way to add new housing.”
“It’s been there umpteen dozen years and it’s never filled,” says Amy O’Hair, a neighborhood historian who lives in nearby Sunnyside and relies on Glen Park for transit and small business shopping. O’Hair is eager to see more housing nearby.
(On The Frisc’s recent visit, the parking was in fact nearly full. Parking data was not immediately available from BART.)
Of course, building apartments on top of a parking lot near transit has seemed like a no-brainer in SF’s recent past, until it wasn’t. But the notorious South of Market project that was delayed by opponents in 2021 was a big reason for the legal shifts and loophole closures that have brought SF to the brink of a new housing blueprint. It’s now unlikely the pique of neighbors and anti-density allies could keelhaul this particular idea, but that’s just one hurdle. Economic conditions — and whether SF’s empty downtown curbs BART’s customer base well into the future — are another story entirely.