Live S.F. summer school for 20,000
After a year in front of screens, tens of thousands of San Francisco students will be learning and playing in person this summer, with free access to summer school, learning hubs and day camps from June through August, city and education officials announced Wednesday.
The initiative, backed by a $25 million philanthropic donation, ensures that the city’s K12 public school students will have access to facetoface academics, outdoor activities, social interaction and fullday child care at no charge. Those who opt for virtual activities will be paired with organizations offering educational options online.
The more than $50 million program, called the Summer Together Initiative, offers the city’s 52,000 public students across all grades the first opportunity to be with peers all day, every day since schools shuttered on March 12. City officials expect at least 20,000 students to participate, with high needs students prioritized for place
lords and the downtown area, as tech companies have downsized and workers continue to stay home amid the pandemic. The local economy has suffered greatly, with BART ridership plummeting by 80% and numerous small businesses closing permanently. Tech companies such as Twitter, Yelp and Dropbox have listed sublease space and said many employees can work remotely beyond the pandemic, casting doubt on the speed of San Francisco’s economic recovery.
Last August, Pinterest canceled a 490,000squarefoot lease at the unbuilt 88 Bluxome project in South of Market, paying an $89.5 million fee, another sign that the city’s oncebooming real estate market is wounded.
San Francisco Business Times first reported the Parcel F news.
The project at 542550 Howard St., one of the last tower sites in the Transbay district, has additional challenges. Chinatown activists oppose the project because of the shadows it would cast on Willie “Woo Woo” Wong Playground in that neighborhood, which has led to city hearing delays.
Hines, Urban Pacific
Development and a Goldman Sachs affiliate bought the site for $175 million in 2016, and the project has undergone nearly five years of city reviews. A Board of Supervisors vote is scheduled next week.
Cameron Falconer, a Hines executive, said during Monday’s Board of Supervisors subcommittee hearing that the project has had a “very long road and a number of significant delays that have impacted the project’s economics, budget and viability,” adding “hundreds of millions of dollars” in costs.
Hines is also seeking to pay $47 million in affordable housing fees, rather than building 33 onsite affordable condos, a change that would require city approval. San Francisco has the world’s highest construction costs, which makes building affordable housing in towers a financial challenge. The fees would help finance 192 affordable homes at a nearby site on Howard Street that Hines and its partners own.
At the Monday meeting, Supervisor Aaron Peskin pressed city staffers and Falconer, suggesting that the project be redesigned to prevent it from casting a shadow on the Chinatown park for 15 min
utes a day during parts of the year.
He also criticized the affordable housing fee payment schedule, which requires the developer to put up a letter of credit but not hand over the cash until the money is needed for the affordable units.
“I’m not interested in the letter of credit. I’m interested in cash. If the sponsor would like to put that cash in an account, that is better than a letter of credit,” he said.
Falconer said that paying the fee up front, rather than providing a letter of credit, would be “detrimental to the project and put the viability at risk.” But he stopped short of saying whether that would make or break the deal.
“It’s hard to say if it would be severely detrimental, as in unfeasible,” he said.
Hines also built Salesforce Tower with Boston Properties, which now fully owns the tower. Pelli Clarke Pelli Architects designed Salesforce Tower, Parcel F and Salesforce Transit Center.
A separate Transbay project, Oceanwide Center, has also struggled. A $1 billion sale of the partially built, twotower project was canceled last year and construction has stopped. The project has no office tenant commitments.