Plans have surfaced for a potential office-to-housing conversion and expansion of a three-story office building at 2300 Stockton Street in San Francisco’s Fisherman’s Wharf neighborhood. Initial documents show the applicant is looking to increase the floor count and bring new residences to the city’s popular tourism neighborhood. Thousand Architects is responsible for the plans.
The latest filing is not a permit application or preliminary permit. The developer expects to utilize the recently approved Family Zoning Plan’s height limit to achieve the expected residential capacity. The San Francisco Family Zoning Plan was approved by the Board of Supervisors in early December and will be enacted on January 31st, 2026.
2300 Stockton Street, illustration by Thousand Architects
The initial filing looks to increase the floor count by two levels, and overall floor area from 62,300 square feet to 90,160 square feet. The project is looking to add 70 units across all five floors, though overall capacity and other features are likely to evolve.
The 1970-built structure, formerly occupied by the Academy of Art University, was recently listed for sale by Marcus & Millichap. The team is asking $16.4 million for the 0.87-acre commercial lot and structure. The local institution announced plans to sell off ten properties from its real estate portfolio in October this year.
The property is located along Stockton Street between Beach Street and North Point Street. The site is half a block away from Pier 39 and five blocks from the Aquatic Cove.
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taking advantage of that increased height limit already. love to see it
Nice! Love to see office-residential conversions (esp in this part of the city). Great building for a conversion IMPO. Fingers crossed the architect maintains the existing curtain wall and uses the same or complimentary materials and window pattern on the two additional floors.
Not bad but I think they could’ve gone a little bit taller here (8-10 floors) to get more potential out of this site. SF needs to build 82,000 new housing units by 2031. I know we can’t get it all back in one project but optimizing density where reasonably feasible should be attempted.
It’s hard to tell, but structure is already 40′ and additional floors will make it 60. I imagine the cost per unit along with engineering costs for going taller are a big part of what the developer is proposing here. I don’t think any developer would opt for ‘less’ if/where there is a guaranteed return.
In terms of the 82k units; the only place the city will be able to make meaningful impact on those numbers are at the handful of proposed mega-project sites (Power Plant, Pier 70, Hunters Point, Candlestick, Merced, Stonestown, Treasure Island, etc). There may be a few other medium large projects coming down the pipe that’ll be in SOMA, but it feels like a crap shoot.
this site was just included in the upzoning plan, and only brought to 65′ with the density bonuses. so 8-10 floors was not possible here.
i fully agree with your wish, though – wish the whole upzoning had been more aggressive
Unless starting from scratch, that 8-floor goal is a hard sell in a reno project. Either we go well beyond 8 floors, or stick to something more squat. Going that high up requires much more intensive structural work, and depending on how intrusive the foundation has to be, it would make an adaptive reuse not worthwhile.
See Toronto, Sydney, or NY for buildings reused and a 40+ story tower attached.
It’s all landfill (non-engineered) in that area.
Everything east of Michigan Ave in Chicago is landfill, and they built an entire city there. Earthquake parameters are another worry, but landslide worries haven’t stopped CA from maintaining Highway 1 along Big Sur.
San Francisco can easily tackle the engineering. But with cheaping out, you get the Millennium Tower fiasco. And when limiting height, it’s not worth the bother, see this site.
Mission Bay’s Stadium is significantly heavier than anything that’s going along the wharf area.
Of course; it is possible to build tall buildings on filled ground….most of the Financial District and a lot of SOMA are filled bay and marshland. And I am not an engineer, but I suspect that the deeper you have to go to hit bedrock may factor into how high one can feasibly build given the available budget.
It’s funny, the building the existing building looks like it should be taller…three stories is a bit strange for a building of this type. I wonder if it was originally engineered to accommodate addtional stories. I kind of dig it aesthetically and I think it could work with additional stories.