Six months after news broke of a proposed eight-story, 35-unit housing complex at 24th and Capp streets, developers filed a formal planning application late last week — with two fewer stories and 15 fewer units.
The project at 3230 24th St. will turn a wedge-shaped parking lot into a wedge-shaped contemporary-looking apartment building. But contrary to initial plans, which proposed an eight-story, 35-unit housing complex, the application filed to the Planning Department on June 25 now proposes a six-story building with 20 units —two deemed affordable for people making 60 percent of the area’s median income ($68,050 for an individual and $87,550 for a family of three) and 18 market rate.
“Following productive discussions with Calle 24 and other community members, we reduced the building’s scale from eight-stories to six-stories to better align with the surrounding scale of the neighborhood,” wrote Peter Logan, who leads the LLC, Trigona LLC, that owns the property with his mom, Marcy Wong.
Logan said the project was reduced by 25 percent in size and that the drop of 15 units (43 percent of the initial unit count) is due to the increase in size of many of the other units.
“The conversations are still ongoing,” said Susana Rojas, executive director of Calle 24. “We’d like to see a meeting in the community for people to have an opportunity to weigh in on the design of the project.”
Logan and Wong are also partners at Wong Logan Architects, the architectural firm designing the project.
The proposed 66-foot-tall building would be composed of 10 studio units, five two-bedroom units and five three-bedroom units. This is another change from the initial proposal, which had 14 one-bedroom apartments.
When asked what prompted dropping the one-bedroom units from the latest plan, Logan said that the change will allow more families to live in the building. One of the three-bedroom apartments and one studio are expected to be the affordable units.
The building will not have on-site parking, but it will have 18 bicycle spaces and 1,207-square feet of retail space. One of the two commercial spaces will likely be occupied by Juanita’s Flowers, one the businesses currently operating out of the parking lot. It is unclear what would happen to the other business, a food truck called Birrieria Lucas.
“We feel good about it [the project] and being able to occupy one of the commercial spaces,” said Jose Barajas, who, along with his wife, co-owns Juanita’s Flowers.
“But, it’ll affect us if we can’t sell during all that time. We still haven’t found an alternative site yet.”
A spokesperson for the Planning Department confirmed the project does not require a public hearing and that the agency does not anticipate the proposal coming before the planning commissioners.
In 2017, the lot’s previous owners, the Galu family, proposed a five-story, 17-unit building on the site. That stalled after Mission residents showed discontent with the proposal because it would’ve only offered two affordable units.
The project has an estimated cost of $10 million.
Timelines have not been established yet, but the earliest start to construction would be 12 months, according to Logan.
