A century-old Mission Revival-style building on Market Street, once a funeral parlor, is about to make history.
If new plans hold up, it could be San Francisco’s first new housing site to take advantage of a state penalty forcing the city to fast-track residential development, bypassing hurdles such as environmental review.
The plans call for a gleaming, glassy 20-story tower and about 200 new homes, which sounds like a recipe for doing away with the 100-year-old funeral parlor.
But the parlor is still part of the design, and if the developers pull it off, the building will meld different eras of San Francisco, including one of its most heartbreaking: the AIDS epidemic.
“A lot of AIDS patients had their funerals there,” says architect David Baker, whose firm worked on an early version of the design nearly ten years ago. “It was totally sacrosanct.”
The city classified the building as a historic resource in 1975 for its arresting period architecture, later noting features like “projecting bays and balconettes” as well as less tangible qualities like the building’s “relationship to the street.”
The preservation of at least part of the funeral home – the facade and parts of the interior –- is all the more notable because when it comes to historic preservation, San Francisco is at a crossroads. Some might call it a wild west.
Thanks to state laws that aim to encourage more housing, the city’s old design guidelines that govern new buildings and redevelopment of existing buildings have been wiped off the books. There won’t be any rules to replace them until city planners write new ones, a process that will take many months.
Law firm KellerGrover, current owners and occupants of the historic funeral home, unveiled in 2015 a proposal to build 96 homes on top of new retail and office space, totaling more than 99,000 square feet.
But with the new fast-tracking rules, KellerGrover has returned with a bolder plan, which will combine four lots, including the one where the parlor sits and where parts of it will remain. “We respected the history before, and we’re respecting it now,” Chris Foley, a consultant for the project, tells The Frisc.
KellerGrover got permits for the original redevelopment in 2019 but never broke ground. (A Department of Building Inspection representative tells The Frisc those permits are still valid.) Baker says delays were related to the cost of construction and the pandemic.
Then, San Francisco’s own State Senator Scott Wiener happened.
Now 20 stories and 200 homes
Under state pressure, San Francisco lawmakers approved a new housing plan in early 2023 to make room for more than 82,000 new homes this decade. Unlike previous planning cycles, in which all California cities must take part, this one included consequences for cities that didn’t stay on track with their goals – and lawmakers, led by Wiener, singled out San Francisco.
Wiener authored a bill last year, SB 423, specifically to hold SF accountable for its notoriously slow housing approval process. It warned that lack of progress toward that 82,000 goal would trigger new rules to cut through red tape.
Earlier this month, the state announced SB 423 was taking effect. And KellerGrover moved to take advantage, revising its project – known by its address, 1965 Market – with more than 20 stories and about 200 homes. It faces a limited amount of review, because state laws have dismantled other bureaucratic levers that opponents could pull to block or delay housing.
All these changes have some SF historians, architecture buffs, and density opponents fretting. San Francisco’s planning department used to have broad guidelines for all projects, including those that aimed to alter or demolish an historic property, and developers and architects tried to tailor proposals to satisfy those guidelines.
But state watchdogs said the rules were too vague, offered too many chances for opponents to delay a project, and often boiled down to a judgment call in the end.
It’s been akin to Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s famous assessment of pornography. Good design might be hard to define, but you know it when you see it. Or, at least, someone felt they knew it.
Infamous laundromat
There was another layer of complexity to those old rules. Buildings that weren’t necessarily historic – because the city had never assessed them for historic value – could also get caught up in the design debate, with plans for housing at those sites potentially delayed.
It’s how the city’s Historic Preservation Commission could contemplate prioritizing a 1970s movie theater with dubious historic value over new housing. (The idea eventually didn’t pass muster.)
A more famous – or infamous – example was a Mission District laundromat. The owner spent years trying to turn it into 75 units of new housing. Among the catalog of delays was an assessment of the nondescript building’s historical pedigree, spurred by appeals from the Calle 24 Latino Cultural District on grounds that the building once housed neighborhood activist offices.
Planners eventually decided in the owner Robert Tillman’s favor, but the Mission District’s supervisor, Hillary Ronen, tried several times to broker a deal to sell the building to a local affordable housing developer. The supervisors also held up the project to hear complaints about shadows, moths, and construction noise. Tillman was so fed up that he sued, and the “historic laundromat” became synonymous with anti-development obstructionism for years.
With Wiener’s SB 423, these kinds of appeals and delays for a building that hasn’t been declared historic will be much harder to pull off.
Preservation has joined forces with the anti-development movement and is now just obstruction by another name. ‘It’s an existential conflict that the city has been engaged in since the late ‘60s.’
SF architect chris roach
As for buildings that earn an historic designation, the rules will change too. The state says SF must write new “transparent and objective” design standards “that involve no personal or subjective judgment by a public official.”
Developers should be able to know in advance whether their designs will pass muster. In other words, no more judgment calls. These design rules also cover new projects, but the most sensitive cases will likely include historic properties such as 1965 Market.
Woody LaBounty, president of San Francisco Heritage, sympathizes with planners trying to craft new standards and blames the state for a lack of guidelines. “They’re trying to figure out how to assess historic buildings … but the state has not done a lot of work on how you take something that has subjective elements and apply objective standards,” LaBounty tells The Frisc.
Planners acknowledge the tough task crafting rules that can equally apply to how much (or whether at all) to preserve everything from, say, a 1960s stainless steel building to an 1880s Victorian.
Planners could “algorithmically create some tool” that would address half the cases that come before them, says the planning department’s chief of staff Dan Sider, “but can we do everything? Probably not.”
LaBounty adds a caveat: “If you do nothing, you leave whole swaths of the city vulnerable.”
That’s because the state’s decree has created a sort of preservation limbo. SF Planning’s deputy director of citywide policy Joshua Switzky tells The Frisc the new rules may take months to finish, and until then, what might be protecting truly historic properties is the economy: Very little construction is moving ahead at the moment.
There’s a map for that
With that vote in early 2023 to approve the 82,000-home blueprint, SF made it official: More density is the future.
Sup. Aaron Peskin, who voted for the plan, almost immediately said he did so only because of state pressure. He has since vowed to derail the push for density, and is staking much of his mayoral campaign on it.
Preservation has long been his calling card. In 2009, Peskin promoted a law that would have had the potential to designate nearly any building in San Francisco an historic asset and potentially untouchable. It was ultimately derailed. (Peskin did not hold public office at the time but still had a lot of pull at City Hall.)
Many others, including Mayor Breed, are pushing in the other direction. Spurred by the mandate to plan for tens of thousands of new homes, a map is in the works of neighborhoods and specific streets rezoned for more density. The latest draft came out early this year, expected to be the final, but it was sent back to planners for revision.
At a June Planning Commission hearing, one opponent of the design overhaul pointed to the new map and was skeptical that new preservation rules could offer protection. “Credible solutions may be impossible,” said Courtney Damkroger, a former planner and vice president of the Historic Preservation Commission.
Damkroger cited the risk to small businesses along commercial and transit corridors, where the city will encourage more residential density.
SF architect Chris Roach calls preservation instincts “very noble,” but in practice, he says, preservation has joined forces with the anti-development movement and is now just obstruction by another name. “It’s an existential conflict that the city has been engaged in since the late ‘60s,” says Roach.
With so much uncertainty around planning rules, it will be helpful to know which buildings actually deserve an historic benchmark. Including laundromats.
But of the more than 120,000 properties in SF, the “vast majority” have yet to be classified as historic or not, according to the planning department. A team led by deputy director of planning Richard Sucre has begun a years-long effort, inspired by similar surveys in Los Angeles, Seattle, and Portland, to evaluate all of them.
Classifying a property as historic wouldn’t automatically make it off-limits for alteration, but it would give potential developers a clearer sense of the rules for altering it.
That is, once there are new rules. “We’re a government that was very heavy on local control for a long time,” says Sucre. “Now that we’re moving away from that, it’s an unknown.”