San Francisco-based developer Aralon Properties is in the middle of a magic trick: its proposed high-rise in a historic corner of the city, three blocks from the waterfront, is growing at a miraculous rate.
And this time, unlike previous proposals for towers on or near SF’s shoreline, opponents might not be able to stop it.
Aralon bought the property at the corner of Sansome and Vallejo streets, currently a two-story parking garage, for more than $13 million in late 2019. Originally, the developer proposed an eight-story building that would hold 24 homes on top of office space.
The project is testing the power of anti-density advocates who hope to thwart a growing wave of local and state mandates meant to ease housing restrictions. And it comes despite a recent move from mayoral candidate Aaron Peskin, also the neighborhood’s supervisor, to set strict height caps in the very spot Aralon’s tower is growing.
The influential Telegraph Hill Dwellers neighborhood association opposed the project back in 2021, arguing that the resulting building would be incompatible with its historic surroundings. At 955 Sansome Street, the site lies in the middle of the city’s Northeast Waterfront Historic District — and in the line of sight of some Telegraph Hill residents’ bay views.
In a 2021 letter to Aralon, Dwellers’ president Stan Hayes called the proposed building — then 84 feet tall — “excessively high and massive” and questioned the need for new offices in a post-pandemic SF. Many office spaces are still sitting vacant. (The Dwellers did not return requests for comment on the project.)
Despite opposition, Aralon has revised its proposal multiple times since 2019, each time adding greater height and density. The plan now calls for a 282-foot, 24-story tower, three times more than originally imagined, and 132 homes, all possible because of a combination of local zoning changes and state laws that allow developers to skirt height caps.
It is one of the three building projects that Peskin, president of the Board of Supervisors, tried to limit earlier this year with legislation crafted to apply specifically to a few blocks in his district, including the home of 955 Sansome.
Update, 10/18/24: A proposed 17-story tower at 1088 Sansome, one of the three disputed projects, will not move forward. The developers failed to submit key paperwork in time.
Ironically an earlier law, also from Peskin, helped Aralon reach for new heights. With Mayor London Breed, Peskin authored a 2023 bill to encourage conversion of downtown office buildings into new homes. He didn’t realize it would also abet the supersizing of projects in his own district.
When he realized what he’d done, he convinced his board colleagues in March to exempt his own district from these new rules, with enough votes to deflect Breed’s veto threat.
But 955 Sansome has not been cut back down to size, due to a 2019 law from State Sen. Nancy Skinner, who represents parts of the East Bay. The bill, SB 330, allows developers to “lock in” height limits that are on the books when they first submit a building proposal, presumably to prevent exactly these kinds of takebacks.
A spate of other relatively new state laws also allow Aralon to “squeeze the balloon nearly any which way,” as SF Planning chief of staff Dan Sider puts it. The result is a proposal that, at 282 feet, now nearly matches the height of Telegraph Hill itself, proportions unimaginable in the San Francisco of just a few years ago.
Aralon and Peskin did not return requests for comment, but speaking to the Chronicle in July, Peskin predicted that once San Franciscans see a building of this scale outside downtown, “the backlash will start.” Looking back at San Francisco’s history, he has plenty of precedent to cite.
F is for Fontana
When Peskin was trying to scale back these encroaching high-rises in March 2024, he uttered the F-word — Fontana, that is.
“We need to figure out ways to make sure we don’t end up with a series of Fontana Towers,” Peskin told fellow lawmakers at a March board meeting. Sup. Rafael Mandelman, who represents the Castro, Noe Valley, and other neighborhoods concurred, invoking “our desire not to see the Fontana Towers replicated.”
When the twin brutalist high-rises went up next to Ghirardelli Square in 1962, they instantly triggered gag reflexes across the city for their looks, their location (400 feet from the bay), and their heft that blocked the views of Russian Hill residents.
In SF’s housing wars, “that was the shot heard around the world,” says Ben Grant, an urbanist at Sitelab: “Those towers and the reaction against them resulted in downzoning of the entire waterfront and really throughout the city,” according to Grant. The 1970s and ‘80s saw 40-foot height limits ushered in across most of the city.
Grant notes the Embarcadero Freeway, which cut off a swath of the city from the waterfront, was also a bugbear until it was taken down in the aftermath of the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. The Fontana Towers, however, stayed standing and have continued to haunt SF housing politics for decades.
When they first went up, then-Planning Commissioner James Kearney excoriated the towers, declaring, “In the Fontana Apartments land has been exploited by builders for the benefit of a few, with complete disregard for the welfare of the rest of the community,” a sentiment that regularly reappears in public feedback for almost any contentious new San Francisco development today.
‘Parasitic architecture’
SF’s density skeptics have invoked the risk of another Fontana to protest developments everywhere from Sea Cliff to the East Cut to 8 Washington, the aborted Embarcadero development of 10 years ago that helped spur the YIMBY movement.
More recently, while the towering fever dream of a 50-story Ocean Beach high-rise was never realistic, it has conjured up nightmare scenarios for SF preservationists and fueled some west side enthusiasm for Peskin’s mayoral campaign.
SF’s anti-high-rise sentiment took hold in the late 1970s, when a resurgence of Victorian, Edwardian, and Mission Revival styles, and the rejection of taller, denser buildings intersected. “A lot of people with money started looking into older houses and [rehabbing] them, and architectural appreciation became attractive,” says Woody LaBounty, president and CEO of SF Heritage. These trends helped shape popular expectations of how San Francisco “should” (and shouldn’t) look.
For some, those expectations remain. In public meetings and angry op-eds, density skeptics frame new buildings as out of place, foreign, or simply un-San Franciscan.
For architectural historian and consultant Kathrine Petrin, the height of 955 Sansome is the main issue, alongside its “overly glassy” design, which she predicts will clash with the predominantly industrial aesthetic of the Waterfront Historic District.
Petrin compares it unfavorably to downtown buildings and modern architecture in cities like Los Angeles. At a rowdy public meeting in June, neighbors likened the design to “the Third Street Promenade in LA” and even dubbed it “parasitic architecture.”
Sitelab’s Grant says residents’ fear of design associated with other cities is tied to the idealism of San Francisco culture: “There’s not a lot of enthusiasm for shaking things up.”
The previous decade did see a boom of skyscraping residential and office towers, but this played out exclusively in downtown realms, never crossing into neighborhoods like Duboce Triangle and Glen Park.
Mayor says midsize it
Alarms about denser housing are sounding as neighborhood-level control over development slips away. At the state’s orders, San Francisco must redraw its map to decide where taller buildings may spring up in the future. Sacramento regulators, who have cited the city’s notorious housing intransigence — SF’s permitting and approval process is the slowest in California — are threatening to step in and take over if they don’t see the results they want.
Most public policy tools that SF planners and urbanists have long used to evaluate new building proposals have been shelved, and they’re scrambling to develop new ones.
Meanwhile, there are even more aggressive state laws that 955 Sansome developer Aralon could invoke to build faster – but it hasn’t yet. One possibility is the “turbo switch” of State Sen. Scott Wiener’s SB 423, which allows fast-track approval of projects that meet basic building code and zoning rules, so long as they include affordable homes for some of the city’s lowest income brackets. (At the moment, 955 Sansome has affordable units that are still too expensive to qualify for SB 423.)
It’s a lurching journey into the future. Mayor Breed began her tenure back in 2018 with a YIMBY-style admonition to build more housing of all kinds. She is still pushing to increase height caps, but in April, as the mayoral race heated up, she urged planners to revise the upzoning map with more midsize buildings — think eight stories, like the classic apartment buildings scattered around the city — and fewer 20-story ambitions.
For now, Aralon is betting that San Francisco has reached a point where Fontana-shaped angst, be it from City Hall or from neighbors down the block, may have run out of ways to block the cranes.
They’d better check with the Earthquake Department of the Pacific Fire Rating. Bureau. Such tall buildings can’t be built there because there’s not the necessary bedrock so near the Bay.