Van Ness Is ‘In Crisis.’ Revival Plans Hinge On Housing Towers and Chain Stores

Van Ness Avenue has been one of San Francisco’s most important traffic arteries for generations, but it’s been decades since San Franciscans regarded it with anything like esteem, affection, or sense of place. 

A confluence of troubles might in fact have the thoroughfare at its nadir. Sup. Stephen Sherrill, whose district borders most of the street, tells The Frisc that “Van Ness is in crisis.”

Like Broadway in New York or Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles, it’s a “workhorse” street, a dense transportation corridor that supports day-to-day life, says SITELab urban designer Ben Grant. But “what makes those kinds of streets work in other cities is a thing that SF doesn’t do very well — which is to say having large numbers of middle income people living a dense urban lifestyle without a car.” 

“Van Ness is definitely underperforming,” says Grant. “The sense of place does not rise to the occasion.”

Bus riders are enjoying a new rapid route down the length of Van Ness, but the route’s construction harmed the street’s merchants, compounding the twin crises of online shopping and COVID. The Office of Economic and Workforce Development’s commercial real estate finder shows Van Ness and surrounding blocks studded with units for sale and lease.

The same stretch also has little residential presence. (The final few blocks near the Bay and a cluster of new high rises near Market Street are exceptions.) Sherrill is calling for “flexibility for both new businesses and new housing” to pump life back into the corridor.

Former lives

Van Ness wasn’t always like this. In the post-Gold Rush years, it was “filled with fine residences, churches, and other institutions.” During most of the 20th century, it hosted the city’s premiere auto showrooms, “elaborate and spacious” showcases for American industry and architectural appeal. Now many of those grand buildings and the more mundane ones around them are empty or underused. 

Van Ness need not stay like this forever. In fact, the thoroughfare is critical to San Francisco’s ambitious plan to add more than 82,000 new homes in coming years. If city planners get their way, Van Ness will sport some of the city’s tallest residential buildings with thousands or even tens of thousands of units, potentially creating a middle-income urban environment that SF has been lacking. 

One problem, however, is that Van Ness itself isn’t a neighborhood — it’s a connector that runs through several neighborhoods, each with its own vital interests. 

Some neighbors say a denser and much taller Van Ness Avenue, at least on certain blocks, isn’t in their best interest. The Van Ness Corridor Neighborhood Coalition — a collection of groups representing Cathedral Hill, Russian Hill, and others wrote to planners in May, demanding they lower maximum heights proposed in the city’s new map: “Our neighborhoods will be significantly impacted by the proposed changes, which we believe are too extreme.” 

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Former SF Planning director Rich Hillis acknowledged “there were differing viewpoints about how much height Van Ness could take” in his talks with Van Ness-adjacent neighbors. (Hilis has since retired but spoke to The Frisc during his last day on the job.) 

But planners must allow for a lot more housing capacity across the city. As a major transit corridor with plenty of walkable amenities nearby, Van Ness is a prime candidate to bear a lot of the load. And theoretically, it should be a place where people would like to live.

It was once. And if not for the whims of seismic geology, it might still be today.

From ‘grandest houses’ to fire break

Named for San Francisco’s sixth mayor, Van Ness was a major residential corridor in the post-Gold Rush days, “a boulevard of some of the grandest houses before the 1906 earthquake and fire,” says SF historian Woody LaBounty. 

During that calamity, Van Ness’ wide lanes served as a critical firebreak that saved huge swaths of neighborhoods like Pacific Heights. Most of the homes along Van Ness were not so lucky.

As SF’s completely destroyed downtown slowly rebuilt, Van Ness became a proxy downtown instead, establishing its present commercial identity. Many of the buildings, such as 1000 Van Ness that housed Cadillac’s West Coast headquarters, went up in grand beaux arts style — as did City Hall, which was built in the 1910s near the southern end of Van Ness. 

Even if many visitors were just driving through, the street had personality and some of the city’s best architecture. But it’s always served more as a boundary — between police and political districts, even between the Tenderloin and more prosperous neighborhoods — than as a neighborhood.

In the early 20th century, the southern foot of Van Ness was a tangle of transit lines known as “The Hub” (a name that the city has tried to revive with recent redevelopment). But like many American cities, San Francisco ripped out train and trolley tracks as car culture became ascendant. Van Ness’s rail service ended in the 1950s. 

Doubling as the Highway 101 connector, it also became a “sacrificial street” that had to manage loads of traffic, says Tom Radulovich, a senior policy fellow at the nonprofit Livable City. (He also calls Van Ness a “car sewer.”)   

SF voters approved a new rail line for the street in 1989, but after decades of delays, it became a rapid bus project with dedicated lanes instead. It went over budget and over schedule, and merchants complained that the six years of construction killed business. 

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The bus line began service in 2022. In a San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA) survey this spring, 86 percent of riders said commutes are shorter and service is more reliable. “While there’s no room to expand automobile capacity, the [busway] has room to expand frequency and capacity by as much as 500 percent if needed in the future,” SFMTA wrote.

If the city simply wants Van Ness to be a workhorse traffic corridor, the bus lanes are a huge step forward. But turning it into a home for thousands more San Franciscans will require more construction. Van Ness has “handsome historic buildings,” says Radulovich, and they’ll likely remain untouched, but it also has many “mediocre buildings” that could be ripe for redevelopment.

On the map

As part of the sweeping redesign of SF housing rules and boundaries, SF may soon legalize high rise buildings — in some places, up to 650 feet (about 60 stories) along the Van Ness corridor.

“It makes complete sense that we cluster more housing along Van Ness and nearby streets as we try to prioritize residential growth,” says Sup. Danny Sauter, whose District 3 has a western boundary along much of Van Ness. 

The board will hold hearings on the plan in the fall. State regulators can penalize the city if officials don’t approve the new map and rules by the end of next January. 

In its May letter, the Van Ness Corridor Neighborhood Coalition asked for drastic reductions of some maximum heights, especially along eight blocks that squeeze between Pacific Heights to the west and Russian Hill and Nob Hill to the east. On the five blocks between California Street and Pacific Avenue, they want to cap heights at 250 feet, down from 350. (Every 10 feet is roughly one story.) On the three-block stretch between Pacific and Green Street, they want 120 feet maximum instead of 350. 

The city amended its map after the group sent its letter, but most of their wishes were not granted. Local preservationist and Victorian enthusiast Jim Warshell, speaking for the coalition, says he and his peers are not against building up Van Ness: “The state has these mandates, and in general we’re all in agreement” with the plan. But he adds that “we need to work through the details.” He plans to attend public hearings this fall. 

Back to business

Adding thousands more residences to Van Ness won’t necessarily fix the street’s retail woes. The once-thriving commercial corridor needs help. 

Those old car showrooms are a big part of the problem. “At some point, between the changing retail landscape and the pandemic, we hit a breaking point” where the spaces simply weren’t marketable, Sauter tells The Frisc. 

Few modern businesses need that much space. Elected in November, Sauter immediately teamed with Sherrill to pass a suite of rule changes for Van Ness, legalizing the division of big spaces into smaller units and relaxing the city’s chain store prohibitions. This week, a movie theater run by a small East Coast chain opened in the old Cadillac building.

New residential buildings also need to play a part by “engaging the street” with cafes, shops, and other amenities, says urbanist Radulovich, who has seen too many big apartments that are “kind of dead on the ground floor.”

For years, Van Ness merchants agonized over the transit construction outside their doors. Now those who survived face new anxieties, as redevelopment raises fears of displacement. SF has strong residential tenant protections, but nearly none for commercial tenants. Planners have promised some as part of the upzoning plan, but they’ve yet to materialize. 

The only protections right now are for legacy businesses, but of the hundreds registered in SF, only four are along Van Ness.

Still, merchants who weather the storm may find themselves with plenty of new customers living just steps away, or on the floors above their shops. “Now that the bus project is done and ridership numbers are generally high and on time, that’s exactly the kind of corridor where you want more density,” says Stanford University urban studies specialist Dehan Glanz. 

The only question is, will it show up?

Correction, 7/13/25: The original version of this story misquoted the Van Ness Corridor Neighborhood Coalition’s request to SF Planning about maximum building heights. The coalition’s letter asked for a maximum height of 250 feet on the five blocks between California Street and Pacific Avenue, not 100 feet. We apologize for the error.