The San Francisco Planning Commission is scheduled to review plans tomorrow afternoon for the 41-story residential tower at One Oak in San Francisco’s Market & Octavia Area Plan. The potential skyscraper is expected to add 541 apartments with ground-floor parking. The Emerald Fund is responsible for the application on behalf of the owner, Washington Capital.
One Oak view of the tower’s crown, rendering by SCB
The 436-foot-tall tower is expected to yield 595,000 square feet, including 419,300 square feet of housing, 53,100 square feet of parking, and around 17,750 square feet of amenity space. The three-level basement garage will be provided for 135 cars and 237 bicycles. Unit types will vary with 107 studios, 266 one-bedrooms, and 168 two-bedroom units. Residential amenities will include ground-floor facilities, the 15th-floor podium-top courtyard, and additional balconies on the 24th, 34th, and rooftop.
The project is expected to be fully market-rate housing, with plans to pay an in-lieu fee to finance affordable housing construction elsewhere in the city. The team used the 2023-passed city legislation to reduce that fee from over twenty percent to 16.4%.
One Oak aerial view looking down Van Ness Avenue, rendering by SCB
One Oak streetscape plan, rendering by Solomon Cordwell Buenz
SCB is the project architect. The latest illustrations show a bolder grid on the tower’s east-facing facade with horizontal white bands wrapped around every three floors, instead of two floors as per the previous plans. This minute change does more to complement the structure’s verticality. The western facade appears unchanged, with a barcode-style exterior and three inset balconies.
The 0.42-acre property is wedged between Market Street and Oak Street, overlooking the bus rapid transit lane along Van Ness Avenue. The project is just one of several high-rises struggling to materialize due to high construction costs, including 10 South Van Ness Avenue, 30 Van Ness Avenue, and 98 Franklin Street.
One Oak pedestrian activity and lobby view, rendering by SCB
One Oak site map, illustration by planning document
The meeting is scheduled to occur tomorrow, March 19th, starting at noon. The event will be held in the city hall and live streamed online. For more information about how to attend and participate, visit the city’s website here.
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This one desperately needs to happen.
For the sake of everyone accosted at that intersection by the fugliness of that donut shop, that thing just needs to go.
But also, 500 new residences, that’s the true winner of this plan. It would be a massive improvement for the pedestrian experience and add a benefit of better safety. I don’t enjoy walking around here at night.
I agree that this tower absolutely needs to get built, but let’s put some respect on All Star Cafe. They’ve held it down throughout the years in SF when many wouldn’t have.
This is true.
It’s an unfortunate losing battle with the neighborhood, and I 100% blame the city for neglecting All Star and enabling the property’s trashing, but who owns the rest of the structure? The property has been deteriorating for a solid decade. I don’t know the full history of All Star, but it would be restorative justice to grant them a new space after all the abuse they’ve put up with. I hate that SF was fining businesses for graffiti.
Why add to something that is expected to come down, but this level of neglect for everything above the ground floor shouldn’t be allowed. This close to city hall? They’d better get the redevelopment approved.
I agree with Drew, One Oak is symbolic. You can’t be a mature, world class city if your biggest intersection has a surface parking lot and gross donut shop on one corner.
If all proposed projects on that intersection come to fruition (3-5K units per an AI search), it could be a tipping point for that area, where the productive members of society who now live there will trigger/lead to higher quality street conditions, more respectable storefronts, better lighting and landscaping, more security, more foot traffic after dark…which will further entice more people to build and move down there.
Even if you “solve” the homeless problem 100%, the reality is that San Francisco is going to continue to have low-income, struggling people, often on drugs and alcohol in its downtown core due to the SRO hotels which are intensely concentrated in the Tenderloin, 6th/Market and Mission. I don’t see those going anywhere. What SF needs to do is add so much housing that the number of productive members of society outweigh them on the streets that it still works and there is harmony, like in Manhattan.
Last point: If I was a dictator in charge of SF, I would condemn those SRO units (they are awful), spend a few billion in low income housing in Candlestick and re-build a low-middle class neighborhood down there, move all people out of those SROs and to Candlestick, and let the Tenderloin gentrify big time. It has good bones, it’s central, it’s right next to Union Square…it would be better for the low income folk to have high quality housing, better for the city to have better street conditions, better for everyone..
This is screaming classism, and is not helpful for people on the fence about building housing if this is the message.
I still wholeheartedly agree that this tower needs to get built, but not with driving away the “drug-ridden poors” to the outskirts of the City. SROs have their place in making the City more accessible.
The SRO’s are horribly maintained and inhumane. Concentrated poverty is proven to be a bad model. Fine then, demolish all of the SRO’s and replace them with 20 story towers which include modernized housing for the folks currently living there, plus plenty of market rate housing as well. Anything but what we’ve currently got.
Most cities in the U.S. got rid of their SROs a long time ago, either through urban renewal or essentially outlawing them in their zoning code.
San Francisco didn’t do that. Instead they essentially ensured that they wouldn’t go anywhere by restricting the encroachment of tourist hotels into the Tenderloin. Also, many of the SROs are either owned by non-profit housing providers or the owners receive huge subsidies from the City.
That was a deliberate choice to prevent the poors from being run out of town. And, generally speaking, some shelter is better than no shelter.
Historically speaking, SROs were a good way to provide low-cost housing to young, single people in low-paying jobs, or people in seasonal industries like logging, farm labor, shipping, etc. Seniors too.
Up until the 1970s, the Tenderloin was not a fancy neighborhood, but it wasn’t THAT bad. The influx of hard drugs in the 1970s, combined with redevelopment in other neighborhoods, resulted in an influx of very poor, and often drug-addicted people into the Tenderloin.
Sadly, nothing will change unless American culture changes, which is doubtful. Unfortunately, many people just can’t cope with our dog-eat-dog, uber-competitive, hyper-capitalist system, and they just decide to drop out and self-medicate instead.
New design was presented June 25. Does it take 9 mos for Planning to get around to reviewing?
50 approved major projects — not a crane in the sky.
Utter insanity that SF is at years-long standstill and cannot become.
I think CA High Speed Rail might be done before this one breaks ground.
By the way, where is Hepatitis Donuts in the design? Do they get rehomed in the new building? Also, the most pee-reeking elevator in the entire Muni system is in that building. What becomes of that?
There should totally be “pee-reeking elevator” exhibit in some San Francisco historical museum to remind folks of what it was once like. Step 1: Experience what it felt like to be in SF during the earthquake in 1906…the ground moved! Step 2: Step into a mid-market elevator circa 1995 and what it smelled like!
Wow, I can’t believe the hate the donut store is getting. That place is always full of people! This housing project looks great, that corner is one of the best pieces of real estate transit-wise in the entire city, but we should cherish highly trafficked local businesses!