A slew of current and former San Francisco city officials and activists picked up golden shovels on Wednesday afternoon to break ground on a 168-unit affordable housing complex at 1515 South Van Ness Ave., nearly a decade after Mission activists first demanded the site for 100-percent affordable housing.
“Affordable housing built with community transforms lives,” said Mayor Daniel Lurie, standing in front of about 50 participants. “I am honored to be here today to start this new chapter for this incredible community. So let’s keep it going.”
Lurie was joined by District 9 Supervisor Jackie Fielder, Mission community activist Roberto Hernandez, Assessor-Recorder Joaquin Torres, former mayor Willie Brown, Jr., and other local and state officials.
During the shoveling, members of the Nuevo Sol Day Labor and Domestic Worker Center entertained the crowd with mariachi and folk music. The Xiuhcoatl Danza Aztec dancers offered blessings to start the ceremony.
Casa Adelante, which will rise nine stories, will reserve 42 units for formerly homeless families, five units for people living with HIV, and two ground-floor commercial retail spaces that will be occupied by Nuevo Sol and Wu Yee Children’s Services.
Lurie highlighted the cooperation between the two project developers, the Mission Economic Development Agency and Chinatown Community Development Center, in moving the project forward. He called for unity among city departments and San Franciscans to continue building housing.
Getting to today’s groundbreaking ceremony took years of organizing and protests against what was originally a 138-unit market-rate complex that developer Lennar had planned for the site. Back then, those opposed to the site named it “The Titanic Mess on South Van Ness.”
Lennar won approval from the city to build the project in 2017, after striking a deal to build 25 percent affordable housing on-site. But the project became too expensive, and the city agreed to buy it wholesale from Lennar in 2019 for $18.5 million.
The empty lot was used as a safe-sleeping site for the homeless until the end of 2024.
In her speech, Fielder gave a shout-out to Mission community members for fighting against gentrification.
“We’re standing on ground that holds more than just construction potential. It holds a powerful history of resistance, of resilience and of relentless organizing,” said Fielder.
Roberto Hernandez, one of those organizers, celebrated the victory.
“Here we are, 10 years later, super excited. I want to thank everybody from Our Mission No Eviction for your unconditional work, your unconditional love, your spirit,” said Hernandez. “You are warriors.”
The project is expected to be completed by the first quarter of 2027.
Only in SF would 10 years of blight be considered a success.
100% affordable housing is 100% what is needed. We’ve got plenty of yuppie spaces vacant already for the transplant techies to drop trust funds on.
*Market rate condos do 100% nothing for the housing crisis, despite YIMBY lies.
So while this took way too long to get rolling *(under Breed), it’s a success now.
(And actually a lot of cities are finding it difficult to impossible to keep up with low income housing production nationwide, look into it. It’s def not only in SF.)
> 100% affordable housing is 100% what is needed. We’ve got plenty of yuppie spaces vacant already for the transplant techies to drop trust funds on.
Why do they have to pay high rents if there’s plenty? Why do they need jobs if they have trust funds? Why are so many of them first generation immigrants?
10 year lead times means that this approach to building affordable housing cannot possibly scale as fast as speculation is increasing housing prices, even with dwindling inclusionary affordable exactions from market rate housing.
The problem here is that people have had to hustle for a decade to make this happen, so their egos get invested in this, which means that if we try to discuss the fact that assembling land and funding are Rube Goldberg machines that are all but designed to drag ass relative to the deteriorating housing situation, we get accused of hating on the individuals and their intentions.
The compensated advocate occupation of activist political space has centered personalities over sober assessments of policies that might impact the economic interests of said personalities negatively.
Of course it is awesome that a market rate project got converted to 100% affordable. But while people were hustling on that, we lost more ground than this trickle of buildings will gain us.
True. This is why the promise that “market rate condos lower rents for others” is a complete and shameless lie, because they not only do not but cannot be built fast enough or at scale to even move the needle whatsoever. It’s how the YIMBY-influencers keep their paychecks coming, promising that over and over as if market rate buildings weren’t sitting at 50% or more vacancy already. If it’s not affordable housing, which based on the median income of the region is already a fairly high minimum salary requirement of over 80k/year, it does absolutely nothing for the housing crisis as we know it. They fundraise claiming so anyway, and apparently feel super proud of drinking that sugary colored drink mix.
Only projects like this one make ANY difference, and you’re right that they’re so few and far between that it really doesn’t do anything at all. 168 units is not nothing, but in the bigger picture it’s just so inadequate to meet the need. Meanwhile they’ll build 10x market rate condo towers at top $, go figure, as it’s a money making endeavor and nothing else for them, and definitely not a public service they’re providing as developers out of the goodness of their hearts.
How do you explain Austin’s drop in rent after building more market rate housing? Minneapolis? Auckland New Zealand? Or is San Francisco special and doesn’t follow basic economics?
This falls into the trap of either we support the YIMBY or let the affordable housing developer nonprofits dominate politics.
Neither approach scales. YIMBY shuts down whenever prices are not rising and the convoluted process for assembling funding and land means that the nonprofit developers can never build faster than the speculators can speculate.
I am not sure that new construction is a feasible way towards creating enough off-market housing to achieve market dominance, setting rents for the market by out competing the market by dispensing with profit like social housing in Vienna.
I can see daylight using tax exempt mortgage revenue bonds to acquire existing housing in bulk, with resident housing payment revenue streams servicing the bulk of these bonds and operations, with an incremental city contribution filling the gap. Each gap dollar is leveraged by resident payments to magnify the city’s contribution to acquiring permanently affordable housing.
Counting on CCHO to dribble out projects, one every 5 years or so, and dominating what passes for progressive politics into the ground in the process, is little but a proffered surrender.
Thank you to all the market rate projects and tech companies whose tax money paid for this subsidized housing project, which will deliver apartments at over $1m per door in costs as gifts to some low income people.
This and the other apartment building next to it are great! Everything between here and BART should be zoned for apartments of this size, with enough units in the first few buildings reserved for needy folks with rent control who might need to move from a small building to make way for a larger one.
I’d argue it’s more a gift for all the contractors that got paid to build the $1M/unit apartments.
The laborer would’ve gotten paid to build a market rate building too. I suppose affordable housing developers are more likely to use all union contractors. But that’s not a huge difference.
The cash-out developer fee for this project is anticipated to be approximately $3 million and will be split evenly between the Sponsors. $1.1 million of this fee is earned by the Sponsors for project management of 1515 S. Van Ness and will be paid as development milestones are achieved. The remainder of the fee is considered “at risk” and is only payable to the Sponsors upon successful completion and lease-up of the project. In the case of 1515 S. Van Ness, both project Sponsors are non-profits and must use any developer fees for 501(c)(3) eligible activities in order to maintain their tax-exempt status.
So, not really, and the math is still wrong….
Contractors are hardly getting $1M/unit. There are plenty of paper pushers and agencies getting their cut of the pie.
Exactly… So much hate for “tech bros” but they will gladly take their tech money (in taxes) , which is twice as much as the average earning person here would pay in taxes.
Begs the question, what kind of tool would thank either market rate development or techies? Both are what have driven up housing prices beyond a $200k salary requirement.
(Also your math is off by about a factor of 10, so there’s that…)
What will you praise next, Reaganomics? Clueless entirely.
To answer your question……the kind of “tool” who pays property taxes based on market rate assessments….you know, those taxes that fund all the programs you’re so in love with. Thank you market rate housing and the people who pay taxes based on those market rate values.
You’re saying the all in cost of this building is under $100k/unit? Are you aware they spent that on just the land?
San Francisco was expensive even before the year 2000. Not sure why a bunch of so-called old heads aren’t aware of that. The NYT was writing about how expensive it was in the early 80s.
The fact that former Mayor Willie Brown, an unprincipled and unethical politician, a sellout and despicable human being, who served the rich and powerful of corporate high-tech, dot.com San Francisco for decades, and stacked the Planning Commission with cronies and corporate benefactors to depopulate the City of poor, working-class Latino and Asian immigrants, and African-Americans, and served 8 years as Mayor of San Francisco and oversaw the second transformation of San Francisco as the continual finance capitol of the West, is pictured shoveling dirt instead of “shit” the ground breaking photograph, is a profound, deepening insult to the Mission Anti-Displacement Coalition (MAC) and all that it means to the community’s history of struggle. Having Willie Brown pictured is an unpardonable and insulting offense to the memory of what the activist movement fought for and continues to fight for!
Hey Richard, hope all is well with you.
The days of MAC and mobilized progressive/left politics are long over in San Francisco.
The nonprofits cast their lot with the Brown machine under Care Not Cash and have been running take no prisoners interference against mobilized progressive/left politics as a condition of their funding for 15 yr now.
Actually having machine politicians take credit for solving a problem they created is pretty on brand for the local activist movement.
ANERICANS FIRST,NOT LAST! NO ON “ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS” DEPORT NOW! THESE HOUSINGS COMING UP
“MEDA” ON 16TH MISSION(OLD WALGREENS SITE) IS FOR HOMELESS AMERICANS,NOT ILLEGALS FIRST!!!!
I WILL MAKE A BIG NOISE BOUT THIS. SECRET MEETINGS (@1950 MISSION ST,)FOR” ILLEGAL ALIENS” GETTING “FIRST PRIORITY” ON MEDA HOUSING 16TH MISSION ST #STOP THIS NOW!
It makes no sense for the city to spend $1million per unit to house low income people. The current budget problems due to much lower city tax revenues, already put the kibosh on this absurd idea going forward. So maybe in another 10 years the city will have enough money to fund another extravagant yet highly impractical “solution”.