In 2011, San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors approved one of the city’s most ambitious housing plans, an overhaul of the 1940s-era Parkmerced, a small neighborhood next to San Francisco State University.
The redevelopment was supposed to yield about 5,700 new homes and replace 1,500 more from Parkmerced’s aging stock, a remarkable bounty given how the city’s west side had for decades resisted new development.
Fourteen years later – nothing.
In Parkmerced’s 11 buildings, sprawled across 152 acres, more than 9,000 residents, all renters, have since gone about their lives with nary a bulldozer, wrecking ball, or ceremonial ribbon-cutting on the property.
But New York-based developer Rob Rosania, who bought the property in 2005, has been plenty busy. Since his Parkmerced purchase, Rosania formed a new company, Maximus Real Estate, and tried to build a Mission District high-rise (with a tone-deaf marketing campaign that clapped back at opponents’ “Monster in the Mission” nickname for the project). He ultimately bailed on that effort.
At Parkmerced, he almost defaulted on key loans multiple times, delayed groundbreaking time and again, and finally lost control too. A federal judge two months ago allowed Maximus’s creditors to place Parkmerced into receivership while courts decide its fate. It will likely take years. On top of that, Rosania is facing a lawsuit over alleged sexual harassment of employees.
Update, 5/23/25: Parkmerced’s court-appointed receiver announced it would spend $70 million on long-overdue renovations across the complex.
“I’ve lived here long enough that I should feel like I understand Parkmerced, but it never seems to be going forward or backwards.” says YIMBY Action’s SF organizing director Jane Natoli. “It always just kind of is.”
“We’re expecting these homes,” Natoli adds, noting how Parkmerced’s total would help SF move closer to its pledge to make room for more than 82,000 new homes by 2031. “People can’t live in projected homes.”
Many SF developments never materialize, for many reasons. But Parkmerced is one of the key megaprojects that the city is counting on to hit development goals in the coming decades, particularly on the west side.
In flush times, the city might simply expect another developer to take the reins. But SF’s economy continues to struggle, and Trump’s tariff war could add more pain. Could the city take more drastic measures to bail out a failed project that’s integral to its future housing health?
Maximus minimized
Rob Rosania’s plans for Parkmerced seem to have ended with defaults on key loans. Maximus had used Parkmerced itself as the collateral on those loans, so it’s now likely to lose that collateral to its creditors.
(Maximus representatives did not respond to multiple email and phone requests for comment.)
But the saga started with a different – and very San Francisco – development stumbling block: neighborhood opposition. Between the 2011 approval and 2014, the project faced a lawsuit from neighborhood group San Francisco Tomorrow. Construction couldn’t begin until the lawsuit was resolved. But after the suit wrapped up, Maximus never filed for the necessary building permits. In 2023, Rosania blamed “sky-high construction costs, inflation, and supply chain issues.”
Delays cost money, with the price of labor and construction materials always climbing – even without inflation or a tariff war. The Frisc asked developers, former and current city planners, and the Mayor’s Office of Housing and Community Development what recourse the city has when a major housing project goes bad, and how it might prevent the next one. Spoiler alert: There’s no easy answer.
Do nothing
Option number one is to hope for market intervention in the form of a new buyer who brings fresh capital and renewed vision. But with the extended downturn of the pandemic and recovery, and now a potential trade-war recession, resale is no panacea.
There’s a big example downtown in the shape of an empty pit. What was supposed to be SF’s second-tallest building began construction in 2016 across from Salesforce Tower. Developers halted in 2019, blaming construction costs and tariffs. Its resale in 2024 was held up by lawsuits, and the would-be high-rise remains a hole in the ground.
Shot clock
Another option is to require developers to build on time by adding deadlines to the master agreements that developers negotiate with the city. One firm must pay tens of millions of dollars because it didn’t finish a downtown high-rise by the end of 2023, as originally promised.
At SFSU’s 2009 graduation, alumnus and actor Jeffrey Tambor said he once lived in Parkmerced. When this drew a cheer, he cracked, ‘That’s the biggest applause Parkmerced has ever gotten.’
Some developers are speculators who gain a right to build only to sit on it and sell it later. A shot clock penalty might help scare speculators away – a good thing for the city. But one developer who asked for anonymity to speak frankly warns that a time limit for all would also dissuade good-faith developers from doing business in the city.
During a down economy, the city won’t take the risk. “Right now they’re just trying to make development as easy as possible,” adds the developer.
Takeover
What about the city buying the property? It happens with smaller sites, such as the former Haight-Ashbury McDonalds that SF bought for $15.5 million and turned into affordable housing. But stepping in on a huge failed project like Parkmerced, in full legal dispute and with angry creditors to pay off, is “not a terribly likely outcome,” says Siera Beal of the nonprofit California Housing Partnership. “It is rare that public entities can offer more than another private developer would.”
Even if the city made an attractive offer, it would then have to carry the political baggage of a huge, complex project.
Renegotiation
One potential strategy that some planners cautiously endorsed is renegotiation of those master agreements.
Developers earn approval by offering concessions to the city, which can include extra affordable housing, green space, public art, and more.
(With Parkmerced, Rosania pledged 15 percent affordable housing, the extension of a Muni train line, a school, organic farm, sports fields, and many more amenities.)
The city can draw up new terms to make a floundering development more attractive to rescuers. “Yes, the city can renegotiate all of that,” says San Francisco director of citywide planning Rachael Tanner. The current environment is a “reset economy,” so the 2011 Parkmerced deal is probably not as attractive to a new developer today. After all, says Tanner, “the costs of goods and labor are not coming down.”
But cities don’t often like to give up concessions they’ve already extracted, and development agreements are long, complex, and can take years to craft. “I don’t know if there would be a lot of [developer] appetite” to turn back the clock that far, Tanner adds, even for something as troubled as Parkmerced, because of all the work.
Check the resumé
Could the city vet developers of ambitious projects more carefully? Not in the early stages, when the Planning Department is involved. “We don’t vet developers,” says SF Planning chief of staff Dan Sider. “It would be problematic for the city to allow only certain people to seek permission to exercise their land use rights.”
Pushing back against a sketchy track record can only happen later in the process, such as when a Planning-approved project is appealed to the Board of Supervisors. (That scenario is also subject to political shenanigans.)
The Department of Building Inspection can also “take a closer look” to make sure a new proposal is code compliant, says DBI spokesperson Patrick Hannan, if a building owner has landed on the expanded compliance control list for at least three code violations within 18 months. “But the individual on the list can still pull a permit as a property owner, consultant, et cetera,” as a matter of their legal rights, says Hannan.
There’s another way to avoid the trap of failed megaprojects, and SF officials are working on it.
‘Really swinging’
The area around Parkmerced developed as part of a pre-and-post-war building boom in San Francisco’s southwest.
“The market really was swinging in 1939 and 1940 before the US entry [into World War II] paused home-building,” San Francisco historian Woody LaBounty tells The Frisc. A huge influx of new residents came to SF to work in war industries, and when peace came again many were flush with GI benefits and eager to settle down. The area, now called Lakeshore, swiftly gentrified into a segregated redlined neighborhood.
That legacy has led to today’s current affordability crisis. According to the Planning Department, two neighborhoods north of Parkmerced, Lakeshore and the Outer Sunset, only added about 160 homes last year, mostly from one big project which itself took 20 years to wrangle past obstructionist neighbors. In years past it’s been common for the sprawling Outer and Inner Sunset to build no new homes at all.
According to SF-based real estate company Compass, the median price over the past 12 months for a single-family home in Lakeshore is $1.7 million, and in the Sunset more than $1.4 million.
The stagnation has hurt Parkmerced too. In recent years resident complaints have piled up about bad plumbing, mold, busted elevators, and other aging infrastructure.
With Stonestown, Balboa Reservoir, and other megaprojects in progress, why bother upzoning so much of the city? Parkmerced’s failure answers the question.
(At SFSU’s 2009 graduation, alumnus and actor Jeffrey Tambor noted that he once lived in Parkmerced. When this drew a cheer, he cracked, “That’s the biggest applause Parkmerced has ever gotten.”)
Parkmerced is a rare historic site that even preservationists would like to change. Architectural historian Katherin Petrin calls Parkmerced “an incredible opportunity” and blames Maximus for mishandling it.
Petrin is also a critic of the city’s west side upzoning plans, which she and groups like Neighborhoods United deem unnecessary in large part because, they say, megaprojects (like Parkmerced) should deliver plenty of housing.
Just north of Parkmerced, developers are planning 3,500 new homes on the parking lots currently surrounding the Stonestown mall. A couple miles east, a City College of San Francisco parking lot is finally giving way to 1,100 new homes, breaking ground this year after more than a decade of fighting with neighbors, CCSF students, and faculty.
Treasure Island and Pier 70 are also in motion. Given all this construction, Petrin asks, why do we need to upzone all these neighborhoods?
Tanner says Parkmerced’s woes are the exact answer to Petrin’s question. If SF had more housing in more places spread around the city, the city wouldn’t have to lean so hard on megaprojects, which by their long-term nature are more prone to economic vagaries.
When state regulators subjected San Francisco to a first-of-its-kind audit of housing policies, they chastised SF for its reliance on big projects. Now Tanner, her SF Planning colleagues, and others in City Hall – including the mayor – want to redraw the housing map for just this reason: No more putting thousands of eggs in just a few baskets.
Natoli Yimbyist ignores the options submitted that included addressing 11 unretrofitted towers and proper infill options and transit upgrades promised. Tambor ignored all the issues of sfsu encroachment into parkmerced and that the low landscaped townhomes are family housing not dormitories… csu you could not drink, smoke or have pets but inside Parkmerced you could so they advertised for “student living redefined” which caused the rapid decline in site with roving parties and defacto frat sorority housing off campus vs prior family essential rental housing on the west side. See “who killed parkmerced” Google it… video is worth a revision to your article… that shows the actual people who lived there for years.
You also forget to have the option of buying it all back from the developers with a public bank purchase with SFCLT… definitely a better option to buy back sfsu I’ll gotten land grab of stonestown apartments and parkmerced…. They are down plenty of students currently… and financially profiteered from buying up rent controlled housing, reminder…