On Wednesday afternoon, the biggest party in the Mission was a hole in the ground
byOscar Palma
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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.
Oscar Palma
Oscar is a reporter with interest in environmental and community journalism, and how these may intersect. Some of his personal interests are bicycles, film, and both Latin American literature and punk. Oscar's work has previously appeared in KQED, The Frisc, El Tecolote, and Golden Gate Xpress.
More by Oscar Palma
13 Comments
Only in SF would 10 years of blight be considered a success.
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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.)
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I’d argue it’s more a gift for all the contractors that got paid to build the $1M/unit apartments.
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Contractors are hardly getting $1M/unit. There are plenty of paper pushers and agencies getting their cut of the pie.
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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.
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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….
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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.
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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.
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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!
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