A proposed new high-rise development in San Francisco’s Outer Sunset district is standing out over its disputed manipulation of statewide density laws.
The LA Times is reporting on CH Planning‘s unlikely new proposal, which could add a Solomon Cordwell Buenz-designed 50-story tower to the neighborhood via provisions in California’s Density Bonus Law — a regulation they say allows for permitted deviations from local building restrictions to provide options for affordable housing.
“It simply defies logic that a building in a 100-foot height district seeking a 50% bonus could somehow rise to 560 feet,” Daniel Sider, chief of staff for San Francisco’s Planning Department said in a rebuke published by the newspaper. “While we agree that this site is ripe for housing, and we hope to work with the developer to achieve that, there is no provision in state or local law to permit the downtown-style building that’s been proposed.”
“The proposed project is flat out inconsistent with local zoning rules and state density bonus laws,” Rich Hillis, the city's planning director, added. “It sets back our efforts to appropriately add housing on the City’s west side and meet our Housing Element targets. Frankly, it’s a distraction.”
(He also told the San Francisco Chronicle that CH “misrepresents what’s allowed by the planning code and state density bonus.”)
CH Planning’s proposal would add a total of 712 apartments, 115 of which qualify as “affordable.” The project, which would take roughly 20 months to build at an estimated cost of $134 million, is, however, probably not going to get off the ground due to opposition from the city and local resident groups.
San Francisco is under pressure to erect 82,000 units of housing by the beginning of next decade, and so the proposed tower would serve as a useful litmus test for density-based alternative development solutions, according to its proponents.
“The City will need to approve the project, and they know it. The proposed project at 2700 Sloat is 100% Code-compliant (both city and state), including the base density calculation,” CH founder Raelynn Hickey said to SF YIMBY. “The project is processing under the SDBL and HAA. It’s really very simple, and we will see it through. The city needs to supply the Outer Sunset area with 11,000 new housing units in just over 7.5 years, and approval of hundreds of small projects is not going to get them anywhere near that state requirement. [...] If they try to reduce the housing opportunity on the best development site in the area, that would be broadcasting a message that says our motto is 'our way or no way,' and we think that would be the worst message Planning could put out there at this time.”
Archinect will share any updates about the development as they are made available.
7 Comments
I love this - developers and architects closely reading the code to create more dense buildings and then the people charged with permitting the building push back at the behest of nearby NIMBYs - a perfect encapsulation of everything wrong with affordable housing, zoning, and land use politics in the USA.
This guy gets it
why would anyone want that near their home. I don’t blame people for rejecting it. At least try to make it look somewhat inviting and less miserable. Sounds like “you are bad for not wanting a giant turd on your lawn. Bad bad bad!”
It must be 4/20 if anyone thinks this is a good idea or maybe a delayed 4/1 joke.
They should raise the whole neighborhood of farty-old two story boxes for hyper-density.
This is absolutely nuts on so many accounts.
The incremental gain in affordable housing is meaningless when the demand is in the tens of thousands of units. High rise buildings anyway can never pencil for affordability due to increased structural and skin costs for starters.
I doubt that the writers of the regulations intended to make this outcome (a high-rise 3x the height limit) possible. However the fairness of retroactively banning somebody's project is debatable.
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