While we missed the Planning Department’s public meeting to solicit public comment on their thoughts of increasing building height limits on Mission Street between 16th and Cesar Chavez up to 85 feet (currently between 55 and 65), perhaps a plugged-in reader or two didn’t and would be willing to report.
I’m sure Sue Hestor thought it was a great idea.
One of the tenets of City Planning is to provide density around public transit. When the multi-billion dollar BART was added under Mission Street height limits were raised accordingly. It would be an interesting study to see how many strident neighborhood activists it took to deprive us of that benefit. Activists should be required to take a weeklong course on the benefits of density before they are allowed to muddy the waters.
Yes! ASAP.
Next up please:
Geary
Entire periphery of GGP. (Think 3 bedroom [families!] apartments with above-park views).
{Only in SF would we have a park of this significance lined with bungalows; a block-long McDonalds facing a major park entrance (huh?)and brilliantly lit gas stations flanking other important park portals. 19th ave, 7th nr Arboretum….}
I went off topic.
There are so many elephants in the room of this discussion it borders on the absurd — in other words, just another day of myth making in topsy turvy SF.
Density is the appropriate word, as would be dumb, clueless, and tone deaf. ANyone who spends any time in the various neighborhoods of this city knows that Mission St. between 14th and 24th is already wildly dense. It is packed with people day and night, jammed with cars, bikes, kids, delivery trucks…
Its two Bart stations are already packed with people and the trains arriving and departing are uniformly jammed second only to the commute crowd in and out of lower Market during rush hour.
Surely it would be a positive development to bring highest and best use to the future development of Mission, and adding some stories to the more blighted properties in itself wouldn’t be a bad thing. But look at recent examples. The condo’s above Duc Loi Market? YIKES! The affordable crap built at 16th & Mission? Ugh. The Bernal Towers at Mission and CC? All hideous, all badly designed, all emblematic of what we can expect.
The devil will be in the details, and in SF, that Devil wears stucco.
stucco-sux…BART has tons and tons of capacity at the Mission Stations…I ride every day during rush hour. A bit (or a lot) more density on the Mission Cor wouldn’t change the way BART functions at all. Remember the trains a 700! feet long. This isn’t muni we’re talkin’ about….
yes, on your aethetic judgements, but you’re all of on your planning….
“…Mission St. between 14th and 24th is already wildly dense.”
It doesn’t make sense to use the term “wildly dense” anywhere in the USA. Not even in Manhattan.
Your complaints seem to be about traffic congestion. Density certainly increases congestion though other factors, notably free parking, have a much greater effect on congestion.
all –
the height limits on Mission have been pretty darn high for decades now — generally 65 feet throughout with heights up to 105 feet or more at the BART stations. Guess what? It’s not the zoning that is keeping people from building on Mission Street, nor is it even the “activists” that so many deride. There are a number of basic logistical issues that keep the area for redeveloping, including:
— lots of small lots. Most of the lots are typical residential size lots — 25 and 30 feet wide. You need to acquire multiple contiguous lots to build anything more than 4 stories, and that is difficult because…
— many lots are owned by family trusts and a wide variety of small property owners. Family trusts sit on properties for generations because the beneficiaries just milk the rent revenue as landlords without doing anything and because it’s hard to get all the necessary parties to come to conesnsus on developing the family property.
— lots of existing housing. Regulations discourage demolitioning existing housing that is in good shape. Even without the policy, it’s very difficult logistically and politically questionable to evict hundreds of existing tenants (lots of them families) to develop a marginally higher number of units. Not to mention that because there is a decent rent stream from the existing tenants (those old buildings were paid off long ago), the marginally higher rent you could get just doesn’t make it that lucrative, because…
— basic economics of the area. Clearly, it’s not a high rent district for a wide variety of historical, social, and economic reasons. So the potential upside is not necessarily there to build large market rate buildings of the scale y’all are thinking about. These things happen gradually.
— quite a few historic buildings. there are a good number of legitimate historic buildings scattered along the street. Like late 19th-century, early 20th century buildings, scattered in between the mid-20th century junk.
When pigs fly….
I am glad to see that the Eastern Neighborhoods Plan is getting an update, that relic has been in affect since Feb.’09.
The mission should get organized or soon every major street will look as cr***y as Van Ness.
Excellent post by “thinker” – right on the money. Another reason…while 65-foot height limits have been in effect for quite a while, you mostly see 40-foot/4-story buildings due to the increased cost of going to steel frame construction instead of wood frame construction for buildings over 40-feet. The one-parking space per residential unit has been a real limiter on development size here in the past as well.
None of this tells me why the heights shouldnt be 85′
All I see so far is why more people havent built to 65′
Lets raise them to 85′ and see where the development goes.
They won’t budge, waiting for 120′
To extrapolate on Miles’ post – Wood frame (type V) construction allows only 4 stories above a 1 story concrete podium. Higher than that you need to go steel or concrete, which usually won’t pencil with higher construction costs to 65′. 20 more feet give you 2 more floors and a much higher likelyhood of financial viability.
The OneEyedMan took my post. . .
In “normal” financial times, 65ft works for condo developments in higher-rent districts – think Van Ness or SoMa. Even in good times, 65ft does not pencil out in most neighborhoods for rental units or for condos. The City needs to be offering carrots like denser zoning to help pull new construction out of the current dead zone, else it’s going to be 10 more years before any significant number of new units starts to trickle out of the end of the pipeline (memo to Mike Theriault: quit obstructing new projects and get out there lobbying for such zoning changes, else stick your head in the sand and envision huge numbers of unemployed construction tradespeople).