Mayor London Breed doesn’t show up to break ground on every new construction project in the city, but she did appear Wednesday on the corner of Folsom and Main Streets, where more than 300 units of affordable housing will soon take shape.
The new project is catnip to a mayor who is fighting several rivals for reelection, and not just because it will supply hundreds of new homes for the neediest San Franciscans. It’s also in the middle of SF’s troubled downtown, which Breed – indeed, most of San Francisco – is desperate to revitalize.
The project could bring up to 800 new residents to the neighborhood, Breed said Wednesday, and her housing director Judson True told The Frisc that they “will add to this growing neighborhood’s vibrancy.”
Vibrant isn’t a word typically used to describe SF’s commercial core these days. According to Kastle Systems, the city’s weekly average office attendance is about 45 percent of pre-pandemic levels. And the blocks around Folsom and Main, many of them part of the two-decade-old Transbay Redevelopment Project, have been hit hard.
The new affordable housing will be spread across two buildings on one block (Transbay Block 2, for those counting): a nine-story structure for formerly homeless seniors and a 17-story high rise for families, for a total of 335 homes, all of them subsidized.
In a neighborhood that the late Mayor Ed Lee once said “represents the future of our city,” partially empty spaces abound. Some call it Transbay; before the pandemic there was also a move to rebrand it as the East Cut.
There is, of course, the Salesforce Transit Center, which was supposed to be the heart of the neighborhood, crowned with a new park from which San Franciscans could take in the rapidly changing skyline.
While bullet trains may someday transform this building into the proposed “Grand Central Station of the west,” the center now serves only a few dozen bus routes. (Breed on Wednesday touted plans to connect additional transit lines to the terminal.)
Just south, Transbay F was once slated for the city’s fourth largest building but remains vacant. The Salesforce Tower and neighboring Park Tower, once Facebook’s San Francisco stronghold, are on the hunt for subleases to fill empty space.
Two blocks away, The Avery’s expensive condos remained half empty as of last year – the top-dollar penthouse was to be the most expensive in SF history but recently relisted at half its former price – although its more affordable apartments still enjoy heavy demand. In contrast, some Transbay housing has filled in nicely; the twisting Jeanne Gang-designed Mira building on Block 1 is nearly full.
Decades ago, this area was mostly industrial space, often disused, and only a few blocks away from what the city once deemed a “skid row” worth replacing with what’s now the Moscone Center. Other blocks were carved up by offshoots of the Embarcadero Freeway, which was destroyed by the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. In 2005, the city finalized a plan to redevelop those freeway parcels into these soaring new designer buildings.
Squeezing in more homes
For many years, Block 2 served as the temporary transit terminal. It was first pegged for townhouses, both market rate and affordable, but the new blueprint is two towers, both affordable only, with some units that will rent for as little as 20 percent of the city’s median income.
To make room for more units, the smaller tower adds an extra floor. “We’re squeezing nine stories into an 85-foot building,” says Justin Mikecz, associate principal architect at Kerman Morris, which is working on the project.
Designers found ways to fit an extra floor through features like narrow floor slabs and “careful coordination of plumbing and fire protection” elements, says Mikecz.
Doing extra work for extra space is a case of maximizing yield: Affordable housing isn’t cheap to build; this project costs more than $1 million per unit. Affordable housing is also complicated to fund, with a patchwork of sources that can expire and kill a deal. To keep it viable, San Francisco has taken on a financial burden with a $116 million loan to the project. In comparison, the city lent $15 million to a 70-unit affordable housing project at nearby Transbay Block 6.
Affordable housing is always in demand, as opposed to high-end market-rate homes or office space, and that reliable demand could help future-proof the block and inject life – hundreds of residents who are also potential customers – back into the corridor.
Via email, Thor Kaslofsky, executive director of the office overseeing redevelopment, called Block 2 part of “the resurgence of downtown San Francisco” and a tool for “expediting […] the city’s downtown recovery,” while Judson True, Breed’s housing director, counted it toward the mayor’s goal of 30,000 new downtown homes by 2030.
Citywide, the 335 new units will only be a tiny sliver of the nearly 47,000 affordable units SF must plan for this decade to satisfy state regulators. Still, it’s unusual for a single project to pack in this many subsidized homes: 335 is more than 5 percent of SF’s total affordable housing production for the past five years.
Architect Owen Kennerly tells The Frisc that both buildings should be ready for move-in by the summer of 2026.
Meanwhile, two other Transbay blocks (3 and 4) are supposed to become a new park and more housing in the future. But those are years away, which is good news for the customers of the pop-up fitness facilities that currently occupy the empty lots.