Updated plans have been filed for a residential infill at 237 Cortland Avenue in Bernal Heights, San Francisco. The application is a follow-up to similar plans filed in 2018, though the latest plans have shifted from ground-level retail to adding an additional dwelling unit. Burlingame-based Eli Sigal of DRS Group is listed as the property owner.
237 Cortland Avenue facade elevation, illustration by Schaub Li Architects
Six years ago, plans filed by the same architecture firm called for a four-story building with three apartments above ground-level retail. For both iterations, demolition will be required for the existing home, an original 1885-built commercial cottage.
The 40-foot tall structure will yield 5,240 square feet of floor area, including 1,240 square feet for circulation and common space. Each unit will occupy a full floor with two bedrooms and open space facing the rear of the lot. The ground-level unit, which is labeled as an additional dwelling unit, will receive access to the backyard, with rear decks extending from each floor above.
Schaub Li Architects is responsible for the design. Illustrations show the complex will be imbued with the familiar characteristics of the San Francisco architecture studio, with boxy bay windows, a flat roofline, a pronounced parapet, and a facade composed of stucco and wood panels.
237 Cortland Avenue, image via Google Street View
The 0.045-acre property is located along Cortland Avenue between Bocana Street and Bonview Street. Residents will be a few blocks from the Bernal Heights Public Library. For transit, residents will be a four-minute walk from the 49 Muni line along Mission Street.
City records show the property last sold in 2017 for $350,000. Construction is expected to cost around $1 million, a figure not inclusive of all development costs.
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More housing in a transit available area is great, will there be any accommodations for bicycle storage or ground level?
The City needs someway to add sticks to the collection of carrots that they’ve offered developers over the past several years to incentivize building housing. This developer has been sitting on a project for six years and then revised it. That is too long, full stop. If you can’t break ground in three years, you need to sell the property to some other developer actually capable of building.
Developers need to start developing, or get out of the way of those that can.
I’m curious as to why cost is only $1 million for retail floor and three 2bedrm flats when a single studio apt in so called affordable housing is said to cost $1million. Doesn’t make sense.
Assuming you meant that the studio apt in so called affordable housing was said to cost $1 million to bring to market, that disparity makes sense when you consider that the above-quoted figure was not inclusive of all development costs, and wherever you read that the single studio costs $1 million, it probably DID include all soft and hard development costs.
Also, the figure mentioned above was probably taken from the developer’s application materials, and they have business incentives to underestimate or otherwise lowball their cost estimates.
Lovely bit of some depressing mono architecture. Smh
The proposed building does not fit in at all with Bernal Heights. It would be a tragedy! Please reconsider the design.