The San Francisco Planning Commission is scheduled to review plans this Thursday for the 15-story affordable housing tower at 772 Pacific Avenue in Chinatown, San Francisco. The commission will vote on an ordinance sponsored by Supervisor Peskin to establish a Special Use District for the new housing. Chinatown Community Development Center is responsible for the application.
New zoning would establish 758 and 772 Pacific Avenue as the New Asia Senior Housing Special Use District to provide height and bulk exceptions for 100% affordable housing. The hyper-focused zoning regulation will require all residential units to be affordable and at least one person in each household to be 62 years of age or older.
772 Pacific Avenue preliminary massing area context, rendering by HCLA and Stan Teng Architectural Studio
772 Pacific Avenue, image by Google Street View
The New Asia supermarket at 772 Pacific Avenue will be demolished. Until last year, the site had been a restaurant and a large banquet hall with a capacity for roughly a thousand people. In the staff report, the city praises the ordinance’s potential to “[facilitate] restoring an important gathering space in the community.” The city’s planning department has recommended approval of the Ordinance and draft resolution.
Previous coverage for the Chinatown proposal is for a roughly 155-foot tall structure spanning 148,400 square feet, including 13,500 square feet for the ground-level banquet hall and 3,300 square feet of usable open space. Of the 175 units, around 70% will be studios, 30% will be one-bedroom, and one two-bedroom unit will be dedicated to the on-site property manager. Parking will not be included for bicycles or cars. The building will include on-site community space and offices for supportive services and property management.
772 Pacific Avenue site plan, rendering by HCLA and Stan Teng Architectural Studio
Details remain the same for the potential design of the 15-story tower, designed by Herman Coliver Locus Architecture and Stan Teng Architectural Studio. Illustrations first covered by YIMBY in June show an articulated mass decorated with zig-zag bay windows and a sloped rooftop awning. The overall massing has vertical setbacks to increase light exposure for residents and an open-air rooftop deck. While the drawing provides a glimpse at the potential future, it should not be viewed as the final design.
Once merged, the project will rise on a quarter-acre property along Pacific Avenue between Stockton Street and Grant Avenue. Residents will be close to the busy Columbus Avenue thoroughfare and two blocks from the recently-opened Rose Pak Chinatown light rail station.
758-772 Pacific Avenue, image by Google Satellite
As part of the development agreement, CCDC will provide temporary housing for the existing apartment on the second floor of 758 Pacific Avenue and will offer a residence inside the 15-story tower once it is complete.
Construction is expected to cost around $107 million, a figure not inclusive of all development costs. A timeline for work has yet to be established.
The meeting is scheduled to start this Thursday, September 19th, starting at noon. The event will be live-streamed via SF Government TV, with public comment possible in person. For more information, visit the meeting agenda here.
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Hopefully they will give newly arrived from Mexico Chinese immigrants first crack at apartments? Then make available disadvantage people of color and people of color in the LGBTQ+.
Um… what? Fairly certain its being dedicated as ‘affordable housing for seniors’
You make these comments on every affordable project. Just go to the developer’s website and read about it.
From CCDC:
“…developing a 15-story 100% affordable housing for extremely low-income seniors in San Francisco.”
“The entire project will aim to achieve affordability for extremely low-income seniors in the Chinatown area and beyond, not to exceed 30% AMI, which will require additional rental subsidies beyond the LOSP units as well as SOS units.”
More housing for seniors is great. However, “Parking will not be included for bicycles seems to be a poor choice. As a handicapped senior myself(75 +), I would not be able to live in this facility because my e bicycle is very important to my transportation needs. Bicycle parking is relative easy to include in areas not easily used for other purposes.
Seems odd. I’m not sure how they get away with not complying with bike parking code.
This is a tremendously overdue vertical modernization. The fact that one-story structures still exist in the densest neighborbood outside of Manhattan, is absurd.
No parking because low income seniors in Chinatown do not bike (look at the steep hills in Chinatown) or have cars. The square footage saved provides more living units.
Few places in the world are more pro-skyscraper than Chinese societies (the PRC, Hong Kong, Singapore, etc.).
Yet Chinatown SF still is about 60 years behind the times in terms of low-rise, outdated buildings despite the density of the neighborhood.
I don’t know why you think that skyscrapers are somehow preferable to “low-rise buildings”. In the U.S., skyscrapers are strongly correlated with unnecessary luxury housing that almost by definition, would produce units that are unaffordable for the people living here.
I would say that Hong Kong-style coffin homes, where its common to find 30 residents living in a single 46 sq meter apartment in a high-rise, are not preferable to the low-rise buildings that are here in SF’s Chinatown now, housing people in relative dignity. There is a reason more people immigrate from Hong Kong to S.F. than the other way around.
Singapore’s skyscrapers are a special case because most of the middle class lives in units that are essentially government-provided housing. I’d support that approach in S.F., but local penny ante mom and pop landlord class here would go crazy lobbying against it if we tried it, so it would never happen.
It’s about time finally after 300 years, Chinatown have been mentioned and rebuild Chinatown, better late than nothing 👏
Um. 300 years? Isn’t that a bit of an exaggeration? Or, maybe you’re not from here. Either way, looks like a good project.
I am an favor of sensitive higher density infill wherever appropriate, but I can’t believe all of these insanely reductive comments calling for the complete razing of Chinatown and how there should not be any one-story buildings allowed anywhere in San Francisco. Most of you don’t come from here and you don’t value San Francisco for what it is and what it isn’t. Why are you even here?
San Francisco is, first and foremost, a city.
It’s not a theme park.