A year after construction was completed on a 135-unit affordable housing project in the Outer Sunset, neighbors say that they are still without a promised amenity: A 750-square-foot community room that would have served as a public gathering space.
The project’s developer, MidPen Housing, pledged to open up the room, but now says neighbors will have to wait until it can find a full-time tenant to steward it.
Shirley Chisholm Village, the affordable-housing project at 1360 43rd Ave. for San Francisco teachers and school staff, officially opened in early September.
Not everyone in the neighborhood was thrilled about the Village. It was built on a former park and parking lot known as “Playland at 43rd Avenue,” which hosted a playground, a skatepark and a community garden from 2016 to 2022.
It was a beloved community space, said former District 4 Supervisor Gordon Mar, which is why residents insisted on having a dedicated “community room” accessible to the public for events, meetings, and town halls. They voiced those concerns in a number of meetings with the developer between 2018 and 2019, Mar said.
But many were ultimately excited about the brand-new, up-to-code community room that could host public events for neighborhood groups.
In April, when the Village finished construction, Rachel Grant, co-chair of the neighborhood group La Playa Village Council, was in talks with former District 4 Supervisor Joel Engardio about holding quarterly town halls in the Sunset. She immediately thought of the new space at the Village.
Johnathan Goldberg, Engardio’s chief of staff, sent an email to MidPen asking about the process of reserving the space for a Sunset neighborhood meeting.
MidPen replied that it did not have available space for such a meeting in May or June. “We do not currently have an operator and lessee of this space, so the space isn’t up and running for reservation,” wrote Michelle Kim, a senior project manager.
The part about the “operator” and the “lessee” came as a surprise to Kathy Howard, a neighbor who says she attended every community outreach meeting held for Shirley Chisholm Village.
“It was clearly stated that these would be public community rooms,” Howard wrote in an email. “There is no ambiguity about what the public was promised.”
In slides presented by MidPen staffer Lauren Fuhry at a 2021 meeting, the room was marked as “publicly accessible interior.” A 2021 memo sent to the Citywide Affordable Housing Loan Committee described it as “a community room that will be open by reservation by the neighborhood at large.”
“There’s really nothing in that northwest corner of District 4,” Mar added. The most commonly used community event venues in the Sunset, such as the Sunset Recreation Center and the Irish United Cultural Center, aren’t convenient to residents at the end of N-Judah out by the beach.
“That’s why this community room was envisioned as an important addition to the neighborhood,” he said.
The problem, said Lyn Hikida, a spokesperson for MidPen Housing, is that the room needs a tenant. It was “designed and intended for a specific local nonprofit, which planned to operate out of the space and provide public access to the community room outside of business hours.”
Sunset Youth Services, which organizes educational and social programs for at-risk youth, pulled out of a plan to lease the space in January.
Dawn Stueckle, Sunset Youth Services’ executive director, said her organization had been in conversation with MidPen since 2018 about moving into the complex and expanding its programs.
Stueckle said she wasn’t even sure if the space for public events would have been built if Sunset Youth Services hadn’t been pushing alongside neighbors to create it.
But in 2024, just as Shirley Chisholm Village neared completion, the city’s Department of Children, Youth and Their Families cut Sunset Youth Services’ grant funding. Leasing the space “became a bit of strain for us,” Stueckle said.
The developer required the tenant to pay a one-time fee of $125,000 to cover the cost for building out the space, and the tenant would receive free rent for the first year, said Hikida.
Around the same time, it began to dawn on Stueckle just how much of Sunset Youth Services’ budget might get eaten up by finding staff to host public events at the space.
“It just started feeling complicated,” she said. “We didn’t have the money to really pull it off.”
Hikida said MidPen Housing is in the process of looking for another nonprofit to “provide the same level of public access.” MidPen is reaching out to local nonprofits and expects to schedule an open house in November, she said.
“We heard from the neighborhood that it was important for a local, community-serving nonprofit to operate out of the space and manage community access,” Hikida said. “That intent hasn’t changed, and we’re working to identify the right nonprofit partner.”
In the meantime, neighbors are frustrated. Steve Ward, co-chair of La Playa Village Council, said residents were “led to believe” that MidPen Housing would make the community room available for public use, regardless of a potential tenant.
“They were trying to garner community support for the project,” said Ward. “This offered a way of doing something for the community; a benefit. And now, to build it and say, ‘Oh we are not doing that.’ That really angers people.”
On a recent Thursday, Shirley Chisholm Village was quiet. There is a brand-new playground with a blue-and-yellow rubbery surface at its 43rd Avenue entrance. Next to it is a commemorative time capsule with photographs, letters and postcards, engraved “Playland 2016-2022.”
But in a cabin on the southwest corner, the community room — a studio-sized space with cabinets, a fridge and a trash can — is locked and empty, with its blinds drawn.
I attended every public meeting on this project. AT NO TIME did anyone talk about someone having to pay ANY amount of money – much less $125,000 – as a condition of managing a public community room. This is, quite frankly, outrageous.
Running a meeting room is a benefit to the community, and no one should be charged for doing it. In fact, they should probably be compensated. There is also a benefit to the residents of the housing. Holding public meetings on site will help to establish a link between the neighborhood and the residents of Shirley Chisholm, as everyone attends the meetings and discusses neighborhood issues together.
There are other affordable housing developments being proposed with meeting rooms; is this going to be the new fee structure for ‘public’ rooms? For a building built on public land for the benefit of the public, this is frankly shocking.
Katherine: I think that the problem is that someone does indeed have to do work in order to keep a community room open. Someone is booking the rooms, someone is cleaning them, someone is handling all the tiny details that we don’t think about. And that shouldn’t be unpaid work.
Austerity budgets hurt everyone.
The community only wants what they were promised repeatedly over a period of years. That’s not parasitic — that’s responsible.
It’s the YIMBY playbook – make promises you have no actual intention of following up on, then call normal people ‘parasites’ for demanding what they were promised.
I think it’s great that they’re building affordable housing for public school teachers. We need more of that! Feels like you’re missing the point here.
If the ‘community’ is so enamored with the space, why don’t they come up with the $125,000 to lease it ? Oh wait, they don’t care enough to actually pay for it. They only care if they can sucker someone else into pay for it. This festering city of parasites…
Read articles, then comment.
Kelly, please, for the sake of the people in your life and for the sake of everyone in your orbit who has less power than you do — store clerks, your Uber drivers, etc — get some help.
The constant rent seeking of existing residents to extract personal benefits from new residents and construction is actually bad for those with little power FYI. There’s a reason all the full time Uber drivers have to live far away from the city.
The parasite in this case is the rodent developer who is profiting for private gain off a public good and devious deceptive false promises. For shame and greed!
Hi Chris —
These comments are monitored in real-time by journalists who are also doing their real jobs. I’m sorry we didn’t post your comment fast enough for your liking but the world is pretty busy these days and there isn’t a flashing light or alarm announcing another comment submitted on the site.
Best,
JE