Skyscraper Proposed for 2700 Sloat Boulevard in Outer Sunset, San Francisco
sfyimby.com
sfyimby.com
I hate that SF has painted itself into a corner, where development has to occur in whatever random locations that happen to open up. I think for higher density housing, locations off of muni closer to the core of the city would obviously make more sense / have a clear market, but we just can't get there.
Clearly, the developer thinks it will make financial sense to build it that way. If it turns out nobody wants it, then all the better, the market forces will drive down the price and make it affordable housing. The only one that loses in this case is the developer. Succeed or fail, it will be a plus for people who want to buy in a housing starved area.
A lot of attitudes like this become a catch 22 where we can't build dense in an area because it's not ready, but it's not ready because the density is low. Even pro housing folks fall into this trap pretty regularly.
It's an easy drive south on the 101 to get to the rest of silicon valley, without the horrible traffic/congestion of downtown SF.
Also, unlike many neighborhoods in SF, there is superb muni access and also great proximity to golden gate park AND ocean beach. What better outdoors space could you want?
I lived in the outer sunset for a few years and it was among the most livable of the neighborhoods in SF that I frequented.
>It's an easy drive south on the 101 to get to the rest of silicon valley, without the horrible traffic/congestion of downtown SF.
That sound is everyone who actually lived in SF laughing at you.
Anyone who claims that going by car from the Outer Sunset to 101 is an "easy drive ... without the horrible traffic/congestion of downtown SF" is a liar or a fool.
MUNI in the sunset is pretty awful as well
The immigrants also use underground cheaper taxi services that ferry workers to and from these locations.
One is obvious to anyone who looks at it. I'm pro-growth, but this is a farce. It will backfire.
If the final project exceeds five stories ("lo") I will be very surprised.
Locals will fight tooth an nail to limit any and all construction.
They freaked THE FUCK out when someone proposed a 7-story apartment unit back in 2021, comparing councilman Gordon Mar to the "the leader of the Chinese communist party" for supporting affordable housing (then he lost his election to someone with no meaningful positions on affordable housing).
Do you really think that residents who went ballistic on 7 stories won't go full-on nuclear winter on 50?
Residents don't care that they're screwing their children, they don't care about homelessness (beyond punishing them for existing), and they certainly don't care about "the nature and character of our neighborhood"-- they only care about "number gets bigger" when they look at the Zillow page for their address.
If they fix the transit issues the Sunset could become a very desirable place to live - you have easy access to the beach, good restaurants, less crime, lots of parks, and generally higher quality of life than the eastern part of SF.
Also look at the cost overruns for extending the underground trains, its massively inept at construction.
Sunset is pretty nice, especially now that most work remote and the downtown soma area is not a great place to be.
I’m in dogpatch because it’s one of the few neighborhoods that has a lot of condos that isn’t downtown soma.
WFH is slowly going away so I wouldn't keep counting on that either.
Will it rent for 10% more or 10% less than something comparable in inner sunset? That's the question.
And even if there was it'd be hamstrung by the lack of infrastructure (roads/parking) so it'd be a nightmare to live there.
Homelessness in SF is about drugs, not housing, its very clear.
A great start.
Yes, 212 parking spots for 996 people/bedrooms in 722 units will cause no parking problems.
Yes, let's do a the largest mega-project of a large and historic residential area next to the shared resources of the ocean and zoo, based on findings from a tiny recently incorporated design company from Nevada run by a few entrepreneurs.
Actually, there's one benefit: they are right next to the sewage plant.
Or, to put it differently, it could be car friendly when there were less people living and working there.
Hey, "additional parking will be included for 327 bicycles." I guess the remaining 183 units are for walkers only.
People who like stuff like this also seem to irrationally hate cars. But even if you despise cars, it seems like a terrible idea to build residential building without at least once parking space per unit. Doing otherwise is just going to create externalities.
Its no secret that SFYIMBY and the SF Bicycle Coalition walk in the same circles; Vastly homogenous. More and more San Franciscans are figuring out how cancerous SFBC is and it'll probably be another year or two before YIMBY is an actual dirty word.
Hmm. I was curious and decided to google that, and found this:
https://www.housingisahumanright.org/what-is-a-yimby-hint-it...:
> To sum it up, YIMBYs started with a self-serving agenda: to force the production of more luxury housing that they could live in — no matter the consequences to working-class communities. To further their agenda, YIMBYs co-op housing justice messaging, but they’re not housing justice activists. In fact, they have a long, disturbing history of clashing with the housing justice movement. YIMBYs push pro-gentrification, trickle-down housing policies that generate obscene profits for Big Real Estate — and they’ve continually ignored the negative impacts of their policies on working-class residents. YIMBYs are not going away if politicians continue to support them. YIMBYs, put simply, are bad news.
I don't believe that people who're pro-development are terrible but YIMBY seems to be a "develop at any cost" idea which is really not great. The people who're most rabid about it do tend to be the folks who coopt social justice messaging for causes like this, they exist everywhere.
I should say I do know some people who are YIMBY and are also very good people.
What we really need is MIMBY heh.
Although the sewage plant is not exactly right next to it lol.
I don't live in SF and have no stake in this what so ever. But there seems to be some smug self-righteousness in wrecking other peoples backyards to house tech yuppies and maybe some token homeless people for flavour.
Also, developments like this will raise property values for the local home owners not lower them. There is moneywise no rational reason for local homeowners to oppose this. So I don't buy the greed argument.
Even right out of college, I would not have purchased or rented a place in SF above ground level with no back yard, no car parking, no bike parking, and no good access to transit. Good luck to the developers, but I think this is a mistake.
If they increased it to, say, 1000 bikes worth of parking, maybe.
Eh, ultimately doesn't seem like an issue to worry about. I'm pretty sure given the right price, there are plenty of people more than happy to overlook these inconveniences. If the developers think it makes financial sense to build as is, who are we to stop them ;-)
People can adapt to all kinds of limitations as the need develops. Pretty sure if the demand for bike parking goes up, there will be people lining up to convert their car parking into bike parking for the right price. Same with public transit, if you really had 700+ voting households that are starting to demand public transportation, I would think the demand would be addressed in a reasonable timeframe.
It’s the bikes parked outside that will disappear fast.
Also, Biking to downtown from that area is probably unfeasable for most people. I've been biking here my whole life and even though I live midway on that commute I would never want to do it. I only know ONE single person who ever did it, and he basically did it to make the spandex biker crowd look weak. San Francisco is not and will never be a city that bikers do well in.
That said, SOMA is a bit different than outer sunset. But still, folks who underestimate the resourcefulness of a drug addict are underestimating the power of nature itself.
This building simply doesn't belong here and the quicker the YIMBY folks understand what is and isn't a bad idea the better.
Make use of the ocean, and the wind. Don't build a building with no good views of the ocean (like that ugly thing[1] opposite the Zoo). Shape it to direct the wind to your wind turbines to generate energy.
Figure out what it's going to do to inland wind patterns.
All of that "land" is sand.
It's faster to get downtown from the East Bay than the Outer Sunset, for both cars and mass transit.
How long until the ocean reaches the building? It's already threatening to destroy the Great Highway.
Can we build a wall of these running North-South from the Zoo to the Golden Gate Park? Then put a roof over the Sunset District? ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Man_River%27s_City_project ) Back-fill housing into a grid or matrix? Like the "stacks" in that movie, but nice?
We could house all the homeless people in the entire country just by building out the Sunset and Richmond districts. Turn SF into a vast "recycling center" for people? (I know that sounds weird but I haven't come up with a better metaphor yet. "Redemption"? "Rehabilitation"? help me out here?)
To grow enough food and handle the waste we can convert [part of] the Bay into Greenwave-style marine farms. ( https://www.greenwave.org/ )
[1] "The Westerly" @ 3535 Wawona St, San Francisco, CA 94116 https://goo.gl/maps/rREGHXWGy8zCAM7G7 I'm generally a fan of brutalist architecture but I hate this, it looks hideous to me. I don't like the way it ignores the ocean.
Real impact would be something more of a city-plan such as "High density mid-rises along a corridor such as: California, Geary, Sunset or even Sloat (but Sloat is hinterlandish) and build an underground Muni (or Bart arm) to support the population's transit needs.
It'd be great if it had a bit more character. Terraces, maybe a public skywalk.
These modern buildings are hostile to communities. They look like fortresses.
After we shape a building like that how will it shape us?
If you're going to put in that kind of time and money, try to make something that 50 years from now will be thought of as a culture heritage site
Don't own it? You shouldn't get a say. Imposing restrictions on other people's property led us to today's housing crisis.
I can assure you, people complaining about the shape/size of skyscrapers in their neighbourhoods did not lead us to a SF housing crisis.
To wit:
Any building taller than the tallest building currently in the area is illegitimate because it is "out of character."
Therefore, the tallest existing building was illegitimate on those same grounds.
Therefore, the building that was tallest before the tallest currently-existing building was also illegitimate.
...
Therefore the first building ever to be constructed in San Francisco was obviously illegitimate since it would have been the most out of character with the previous millions of years of no development.
Therefore all development is illegitimate.
Since this is absurd, the proposition should be rejected.
QED.
For a general criterion, I think that double the local median building height would be a good line, though at least 3 stories should always be allowed anywhere with affordability issues.
Vacancy is at an all time high right now, people are leaving my hometown because of our horrendous government.
That's such an unattractive sentiment, blergh!
The larger your building, the higher your responsibility to your community. A building doesn't only sit on your lot, you're also inflicting it on your neighbors.
Anyway, large apartment building is fine, but if you make it big, then make sure it doesn't look like dreck.
there's many places with restrictions that have no such problems and many places with problems that have no such restrictions.
The correlation between those two things is in actual material, real world, non theoretical but real, reality is effectively zero
I say this as a native San Franciscan.
Understanding something is not the same as liking or agreeing with it.
- - - -
Heh, seriously though, FWIW, as someone who grew up here and was, until recently, against what I called at the time the Manhattan-ization of San Francisco, the argument that did the most to change my mind about growth was a quick review of the history of the place: In a nutshell: Ohlone, Spanish, 49ers, ..., Beatniks, Hippies, ..., Tech Bros.
In other words, locals getting displaced by incoming waves of invaders is more-or-less the history of San Francisco, from founding to the present day.
That, combined with the simple fact that I'll never realistically be able to afford to buy a home in my home town (despite having a decent career programming computers), convinced me that we should try to build ridiculous amounts of housing here. Like enough to put a serious dent in the housing shortage on a national scale, eh? Let's build hundreds of thousands of new units! I don't know how the logistics would work out, but I bet we could figure it out.
I should also point out that 20 year high interest rates are bringing down the prices of homes so you may be able to buy one here shortly.
Yes, we are probably 50-60k units behind where we should be, but that doesn't mean we should build them without intelligence. Building along underground transit lines should be the primary goal because thats where its the most sustainable AND where its most likely to fix our urban blight brought on by the last 3 years of "stuff".
The city's budget does need new taxpayers but putting folks all the way out by the ocean is truly a bad idea and a way to create pain.
It's relevant to getting the current residents to recognize that they're not the ultimate endpoint to the history of the San Francisco peninsula, eh? At least, that's what it did for me. :)
> you forgot the Yuppies then the Wuppies :)
It's true. That '...' between the 49ers and the Beatniks elided a lot too, eh?
> Yes, we are probably 50-60k units behind where we should be, but that doesn't mean we should build them without intelligence. Building along underground transit lines should be the primary goal because thats where its the most sustainable AND where its most likely to fix our urban blight brought on by the last 3 years of "stuff".
> The city's budget does need new taxpayers but putting folks all the way out by the ocean is truly a bad idea and a way to create pain.
I agree with you. Well said! Cheers
YIMBYism is very misguided in SF.
(Also, the idea that you need to have lived here for some arbitrary tenure to vote on issues is gross.)
In other words, it's nice that your family was able to make it work here, and I genuinely think that it is an important perspective to consider, but maybe keep in mind that just because others weren't / aren't as fortunate doesn't mean they shouldn't have an equal claim to shaping the city's future.
All of those past issues are gone as of 70-40 years ago, harping about them is orthogonal.
I know plenty of people who're poor who've managed to stick it out as well, or they left for greener pastures and are happy with those choices.
And as I've said elsewhere - building is fine, but this building is ridiculous.
For another, the fact that some people are able to make it work doesn't change the fact that the policies you and your friends advocate for actively make it harder for people to "stick it out." Which is a convenient way to limit who gets a say in what this city becomes.