Thursday was a sad day for Mission District activists who hoped to see affordable housing at the corner of 22nd and Mission streets, the site of a deadly 2015 fire. Instead, the San Francisco Planning Commission narrowly approved a controversial 91 percent market-rate project at the site.
The final vote was 4-3, giving the green light for a 181-unit, 10-story apartment complex at the site of what has been known as “La Muerte de la Misión.” The approval comes just over a decade after a fire destroyed the building, killing 38 year-old Mauricio Orellana and displacing nearly 60 residents and 26 businesses, including Mission Local.
Nearly two dozen members of the public spoke against the project, pleading with planning commissioners to vote against a plan that they say would only exacerbate gentrification, displacement and inequity. The complex would also represent a win for owner Hawk Lou, following allegations of faulty smoke alarms and improper maintenance on wiring.
While the fire department determined the cause of the lethal blaze was faulty wiring, Lou continues to blame a tenant’s cooking fire.
The current proposal would include 19 units of affordable housing, or roughly nine percent.
“Ninety percent of the units are for high-income earners,” said Larissa Pedroncelli, an activist with United to Save the Mission, “deepening existing disparities” in access to housing in the Mission.
Lawyers for Lou appealed to commissioners to support the project on the basis of the state’s 2023 state density-bonus law, which allows the streamlining of projects by eliminating public hearings borne from the California Environmental Quality Act.
Three commissioners voted against the project: Kathrin Moore, Theresa Imperial and Gilbert Williams. They were outvoted by Derek Braun, Amy Campbell, Sean McGarry and Lydia So.
“This project represents unaffordability. It represents a policy that doesn’t work, that doesn’t build community. It hurts the residents of the Mission District,” said Williams. “I don’t know what to say. I know there’s a state law in effect, but I think the state law is wrong.”
Williams inquired about the possibility of making amendments to the state law, a doable possibility on paper, but one that would require substantive political action.
On Friday morning, District 9 Supervisor Jackie Fielder said the housing project’s approval may not immediately bring residents to the now-empty lot.
“Even though this is approved, the lot will likely continue to sit empty, because the market isn’t profitable for investors right now,” she said Friday morning. “The community knows that, and knows that it’s about financing, which I’m still committed to finding for truly affordable housing for the community that lives here.”
When I’ve walked around the neighborhood over the past few years, affordable housing is ALL that’s been built. 17th and Folsom. 16th and Folsom. Mission and 16th. Any large-scale development has been affordable. The last large market-rate housing structure was the one right next to this lot: the Vida. If we don’t build market rate, we’re endangering affordable housing – people will just kick tenants out of their smaller multi-units and make them TICs. We need *some* market rate construction to ease the pressure on people in rent-controlled apartments.
I am living proof of the need for this kind of new housing. 30 years ago I was looking to buy a home in the Mission. I wanted a new-build market-rate condo but none were being built back then. So instead I had to buy a multi-unit building and OMI the existing tenants.
New build market rate housing units protect existing tenants from OMI and Ellis evictions.
Right, the collapse in demand for market rate housing has sent builders to the sidelines because lenders won’t finance projects unless housing prices are increasing.
If there’s a collapse in demand for market rate housing, why are rents so high and vacancies so low?
Rents can be high and vacancies can be low, and if the combination of the two doesn’t point to rising rents, then lenders stay on the sidelines.
Fact: This project has 19 affordable units which is more than the previous building had.
“Affordable” meaning ~36-40k per year in rent based on 80% rule, and the rest are at current market rate – and many of those displaced from the fire had long term tenancies but due to the delay and lack of legal funding are not being allowed to return for a priority spot at their previous rent + API. So you’ve displaced a bunch of people because of a suspicious fire owned by a slumlord-at-best who now gets to profit from it massively. Fact: New market rate units don’t help anything but furthering gentrification and pushing more long term tenants out of the area.
Nice job by the Mission neighborhood groups. They spent ten years on this effort harassing the property owner and accomplished precisely nothing other than preventing people from living there.
Won’t somebody please think of the slumlord who burned his own building down 🙁
Apologists gonna apologize for wealthy developer / owners…
Building new homes on sites where there are currently no homes cannot cause “displacement” by definition.
A travesty, but not a surprise. Scratch its artisinal woke veneer, and this town is a corrupt cesspool of wealthy privilege. Hawk Lou exemplifies how the wealthy benefit by waging economic war against the working class with the assistance of the local political establishment.
If the old building had ~40 units “below market rate”, shouldn’t the new building have that same amount? 19 units out of 181 doesn’t seem right.
The previous building had 0 units of deed restricted subsidized housing.
got it. but im guessing the units in the old building rented for MUCH less than the 162 will rent in the new building…
You should lobby the city to legalize building noncompliant fire traps. Until that happens, it’s nobody’s choice that putting up a building in San Francisco costs $1000/sq ft and rents need to fund that expense.
All these officials and advocates griping about gentrification and how wrong the state law might be. They’re playing the world’s smallest violin until they can find it in themselves to name horse and rider: Scott Wiener and his cabal of YIMBYs. But then, they probably figure this would get them ejected from the CA musical chairs of appointments to the next political position.
Fielder’s probably right about the bottom line: Nothing’s going to get built for the foreseeable future. What with astronomical construction cost and sagging demand, as SF keeps bleeding residents while apartments and condos keep sitting empty.
The dude’s untouchable. He’s a social liberal, a [insert ascriptive identity here], and in the pocket of the real estate industry that controls City Hall and Sacramento. Along with dear Brooke, he’s the Platonic ideal of the modern neo-libwul Democrat. He’s too weird to get national play, and probably too odd for governor or senator, but considering how easily-manipulated SF voters are by cynically-deployed identify politics, he’s a lock for the House when Pelosi gives up her military-industrial inside trader gig.
That is correct it is Scott Wiener’s entire reason to exist, gentrification and self enrichment for his clan of so-called Democrats, real world Plutocrats.
Scott Wiener and the YIMBY reward arson.