Preliminary plans have surfaced to replace the 1200 La Playa Street gas station with housing in San Francisco’s Outer Sunset. The site is next to Ocean Beach, the iconic Murphy Windmill by Golden Gate Park’s southwest corner, and a future senior housing development. The applicant has submitted three variants for the city to consider in a requested project review meeting.
ARCUS Architecture + Planning is responsible for the application. Project plans have been published with floor plans and residential capacity details. However, the documents do not provide insight into the future exterior design. The owner of ARCUS Architects, Samuel Kwong, has yet to reply to a request for comment. The studio’s available portfolio predominantly includes single-family homes and restaurant interiors, as well as the proposed conversion of a hotel into housing in SoMa, and an apartment infill in Oakland.
1200 La Playa Street Variant 2, floor plans by ARCUS
The three variants could bring between 10 to 30 apartments. Each project will produce several affordable units, though the exact quantity has yet to be established. The first variant would bring 10 units in a four-story building. The second variant is the largest potential development, bringing around 30 units in a six-story mid-rise. Both of these options will include a new commercial retail space facing Lincoln Avenue.
1200 La Playa Street Variant 3, site map by ARCUS
The final variant would subdivide 1200 La Playa into four lots, and each lot would be built with a three-unit townhome-style infill. Project plans show the architect considering facing three of the four units toward Lincoln Avenue or all four facing La Playa Street. In total, the project will bring 12 apartments and four potential ADUs.
The site is located across from 1234 Great Highway, a three-story 60-key motel that the city plans to replace with over two hundred units of affordable senior housing by TNDC. The project is one of five different developments that will add over five hundred affordable units assisted by MOHCD in neighborhoods with minimal new development.
City records show the property last sold in 2010 for $750,000, and the project application lists Ed Hadad as the owner. The estimated cost and timeline for the project have yet to be established.
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This is very ableist removing vital infrastructure in return for a measly couple dozen housing units.
I demand a full-scale protest that blockades any construction to really show how willful progressives can be. How dare the man say they can take our right to buy and pollute with gasoline.
Sure, it’s a cruddy corner that has long lost its glamour, and its presence is more of a burden on society than one of use, but…
Looking at you nose-pierced hippies of Berkley, show us what you’re made of! Prove to us that a dead lawn full of tents is more impactful than the homes of happy students and those wanting a chance at something more.
This is very different. Cars to casas.
This gas station doesn’t have nearly the same history or meaning as people’s park.
Go back 10+ years of Google Street View on that park; not once is there a year where trash isn’t spewed everywhere. Not once are there groups of people congregated with their belongings. Most normal parks don’t need constant reminders plastered everywhere not to do drugs on the premises. If parks coalign with a liberal agenda, an open space to get high as a means to protest bureaucracy is childish. Homelessness is an unfortunate product of a broken society, but we shouldn’t be enabling a glorified lifestyle of it. The fact you can see people shooting up in public across the Bay Area is disgusting and shameful.
This so-called “park” has been a dump for years. It’s unsafe for kids or pets, does very little to the region’s ecology, and its current existence is more of an enabler of shady activity than promoting a healthy community.
There may be more questionable activity taking place on the development side. For example, why have city officials let this property deteriorate so heavily? Someone has enabled the park’s demise. But as it stands, there is no justification for keeping the park in its current state, and any plans to clean up/redevelop it have failed to gain traction. Why?
Golden Gate Park isn’t anything like you described. You don’t know what you are talking about.
Definitely talking about People’s Park, not Golden Gate Park.
Golden Gate, actually, serves a purpose and connects people with the outdoors.
But knowing Sunset, those “all-knowing” locals flood to these project in a calamity expressing how the city has gone to sh*t and there’s no room for anyone else.
To those that can read the original comment through, it’s 100% speaking in a condescending tone of hyperbole.
Improve transit so there’s no need for any urban gas stations.
“Homelessness is an unfortunate product of a broken society, but we shouldn’t be enabling a glorified lifestyle of it.”
UC Berkeley students enjoy People’s Park for reasons other than “enabling homelessness.” It’s a public garden space for students and residents to use as a hangout spot, which is always an important part of city planning that YIMBYism generally supports
As for the proposal described in this article, it isn’t taking up a chunk of Golden Gate Park. It’s taking up a gas station in Sunset District, across the street from the park.
The redesign in Berkeley will include plenty of green space where people can hang out. It’s not like the university is destroying green space and paving over the whole thing. The revitalized property will be a better park for the community than the current “Park” is.
The park right now is a very exclusive place where only one chunk of the community feels inclined to use it, or even comfortable using it. It’s a space that leftists and the homeless community have claimed for themselves. It’s not a true community park and it’s horribly underutilized for that very reason. Most people go to Willard or some of the copious green space on campus to hang out.
If a gas station chooses to sell to a private company, let them. It’s not like the city is forcing the gas station to sell their land. Plus, the developer is fronting the costs to do the environmental remediation which is very expensive with underground gas tanks.
Joe: He was engaging in an off topic description of People’s Park, Not GGP. not sure this post was in any way the best place for his screed ( which is spot on by the way) but he was also being sarcastic about the strong BANANA tendency of modern pwogwezivs
The People’s Park situation is a choice between a public garden space and a housing project, 2 things that YIMBYs support
Also saying the UC Berkeley protesters have a “BANANA tendency” is funny since BANANA stands for “build absolutely nothing anywhere near anything” and those students have been supporting housing construction to make prices cheaper from the beginning
Frankly I don’t care but there is not a lot of information to react too? It looks like a another poorly planned and designed building, when are we going to come to our senses, just building expensive housing is not going to solve our housing issue.
The more housing built, the cheaper it becomes. It won’t take one project to solve homelessness or the housing shortage, which is why there’s a whole database of them and some of them are even skyscrapers
A couple things. First, new housing will always be more expensive than older stuff. If you have sticker shock now, just wait a decade or two for these buildings to become more affordable. (There should have been a steady construction of new buildings so there’d always be a good chunk of 10-year-old ones, but unfortunately San Francisco and the Bay Area have been under building for decades so the housing cycle is out of whack & off schedule).
Second, if people in San Francisco, or really anywhere, want to have cheaper new housing that doesn’t require subsidies, they need to change things like zoning and building codes. The state level legislation to allow point access block, single stairwell buildings is a good start. Other things like eliminating parking minimums can help, too.
“The more housing built, the cheaper it becomes.”
-The Scott Wiener lie to get developer money, oft-quoted COMPLETE BS.
UNLESS the new housing has significant low-income housing %’s, like 50%,
new yuppie apartments and condos DO EXACTLY NOTHING for the housing crisis.
Get real YIMBY liars.
My comment was two sentences long, and judging by your reply it seems like you only read the first one. So I’ll bring the second sentence back here: “It won’t take one project to solve homelessness or the housing shortage, which is why there’s a whole database of them and some of them are even skyscrapers”
San Francisco is an expensive city to live in because there is a housing shortage, not because the housing it has built has failed to keep the prices high.
For this specific project in the Sunset District, it has little information and it seems to be 6 stories at maximum. That’s not a very significant proposal, and no one should think this housing project will solve homelessness on its own
“San Francisco is an expensive city to live in because there is a housing shortage, not because the housing it has built has failed to keep the prices high.”
Why is housing so expensive in cities which build at 2-3x the rate as SF, like San Diego, or places like NYC, which builds at 10x the rate?
People love to say SF should build like Manhattan, but Manhattan has an affordability crisis as well.
Manhattan will always be expensive until the state figures out how to enact effective tax policy to discourage foreign money-launderers and other shady billionaires from buying up apartments and letting them sit empty.
At least SiliconValleyRiseUp (BTW, sounds like various corrupt non-profits that Billionaires use to woo voters to pet candidates) acknowledges that the handful of new projects actually in the works will not make an appreciable dent in the housing crisis (felt almost exclusively at the lowest rung of the economic ladder), if at all, for several decades, and SVRU also side-steps the main point made – that unless the % of low-income units in these projects is significant (~50% as mentioned) there will be no benefit whatsoever. Adding new units at market rates for new construction at the rates we are doing so does not cure the housing crisis, full stop. Not ever. It’s a lie invented for the purpose of jamming monster developments down residents’ throats without proper review or neighborhood input. It was invented by those who profit exclusively from developer money in their political campaigns, and it has zero possibility of ever significantly affecting the housing crisis which is a regional and statewide issue, if not a national one. There are places to build massive developments, sleepy existing neighborhoods are ridiculously poor fits and the people trying to jam them through DO NOT LIVE HERE. They see dollar signs and move on to the next strip mall project.
It sounds like the replacement of the beachside Motel will be low-income housing, which is a good thing. That project may make sense and be useful, compared to the under-utilized motel. It will not, however, make a mote of difference for the housing crisis, and it’s time people high on Yimby slogans get real and start telling the truth about that. Repeating the lie does not make it true, and SF is a poor fit for State/regional studies fomented intentionally to support developer pocketbooks at the expense of existing residents and neighborhoods.
Oh stop your nonsense rants til you come back with some badly needed citations. The ‘sleepiness’ of the Sunset and Richmond is exactly what’s ridiculous. It should have Paris-level density. The outdoor cafes just need more thoughtful design to keep icy winds from spoiling the fun.
You cite nothing except a fantasy about Paris that has nothing to do with anything. Get real.
“It should have Paris-level density.” Oh, and Venice-level canals, since we’re fantasizing.
At least you tacitly admit none of this BS has anything to do with solving the housing crisis in our lifetimes, Glen. Just move to Paris already rather than pretending to be a futurist by supporting strip mall style housing developments in an already built up city. No amount of density changes the affordability of housing in SF unless it’s significantly low-income housing, and that has to be done in places where it’s supported by infrastructure or it fails. There’s plenty of places in CA to build that fit the bill, this isn’t one. If you want to see Paris go see Paris and leave SF out of your fantasies that have literally nothing to do with the housing crisis. Fantasy doesn’t pay the bills Glen. Selling out to developers is exactly what the chorus of slogans is intended to achieve, as Weiner’s machinations clearly demonstrate. Jr. Realtor’s license is in the mail.