San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Neighbors seek to halt monster Noe home plan
The Noe Valley home, built in 1929, features just 1,200 square feet of living space, but loads of charm. Like the window panes, garage door and tile work in matching teal. Like the large, lush garden that connects to those of the neighbors for a magical open space popular among kids who can forget for a moment they live in a bustling city.
Well, all that’s true for now anyway.
Under a proposal before the City Planning Department, the new owner would demolish the twostory house. Sure, cities change, and old homes aren’t forever. But its replacement would swell to four stories with nearly 6,000 square feet of space. Its new footprint would expand in three directions, including 30 feet back, eliminating much of the garden oasis. It would feature a
twocar garage, multiple decks and even an elevator.
“I call it Will Farrell from ‘Elf,’ ” said Jake Schwarz, who owns the house behind it, including part of the linking gardens, referring to the comedy in which the 6foot3inch actor plays one of Santa’s little helpers.
The crazy part? In a city that likes to micromanage every possible change — from opening an ice cream shop to erecting a gazebo in your own backyard — this sort of monster home is perfectly fine.
“You can build a house that’s 1,000 square feet or a house that’s 8,000 square feet as long as you meet the height and setback requirements,” explained John Rahaim, who retired as San Francisco’s planning director in 2019. “It’s a national trend, people with a lot of money building huge houses because they can.”
The even crazier part? One superrich family can live in 6,000 square feet, but the samesize box in Noe Valley and the majority of San Francisco could not include homes of 1,500 square feet apiece for four families. (This proposal would include an inlaw unit, but the city doesn’t check whether they’re occupied, and it’s believed there are thousands of vacant units around the city.)
Generally, the city and nosy neighbors need to get out of the way and allow property owners to do what they want within reason. But in the case of 4250 26th St., the neighbors fighting the owner who wants to build a McMansion have a valid point.
We need more housing for more people. Not bigger homes for people who happen to be superrich.
“We would 100% support this if it was four families,” said Schwarz, who bought his own home in 2004.
So would his neighbor Steve Boeddeker, who said he’s irked developers are scooping up homes all over the neighborhood to turn them into McMansions and resell them for many millions.
“These big glass boxes are being made by people who don’t even intend to live here,” he said. “They’re just trying to get as much square footage as they can.”
“We call them Apple stores,” said Schwarz, who seems to have a lot of nicknames for these giant homes. “They all watch a lot of HGTV. It’s the same style all over.” We seem to have ceded a lot of land lately — particularly in Noe Valley, the Castro and Glen Park — to developers to create these Apple stores with elevators, wine cellars and even personal basketball courts. No longer are mansions for multimillionaires confined to Sea Cliff, Pacific Heights and St. Francis Woods. They’re expanding in all directions — like their footprints.
This trend continues while teachers, nurses, social workers and artists can’t afford to live here. While regular families get pushed to the far reaches of the Bay Area and must commute long distances to their city jobs, filling the freeways with traffic and the air with emissions.
For a supposedly progressive, equity-minded, environmentally conscious city, our professed values don’t remotely match our reality.
“I do not think there is value for San Franciscans in turning our existing neighborhoods into luxury neighborhoods for the wealthiest people in the world,” said Supervisor Rafael Mandelman, whose District Eight is ground zero for monster homes. “These are lovely and delightful neighborhoods that we would like to see become more diverse and more economically balanced, and we’re moving in the wrong direction.”
Mandelman’s doublebarreled proposal to combat this trend, first reported here in January, is moving along like so many good ideas to tackle the city’s major crises — slowly and without much support.
He introduced legislation last month to allow singlefamily homes on corner lots to be converted to fourplexes. He’s leaning toward introducing legislation next year to make fourplexes legal on all singlefamily lots in the city, an idea backed by Sacramento, Berkeley, Minneapolis and other cities, but somehow deemed apocalyptic by San Francisco NIMBYs.
Mandelman also introduced accompanying legislation making it harder to build monster homes by requiring developers to get the Planning Commission’s blessing in many cases. Building or expanding a house to 2,500 square feet would be fine, but building a larger home would require a special approval. Mandelman has no support on the board for the legislation so far, he said.
The current rules for McMansions aren’t working. They’re allowed, though neighbors can file a discretionary review application, arguing there are “exceptional and extraordinary circumstances” that require more analysis. Five families have done that for the Noe Valley home, including Shannon Hughes and her husband, Schwarz.
The families met with a representative from the Planning Department and the lawyer for the property owner in May, and Hughes said the lawyer agreed to shave 500 square feet off the design, bringing it to 5,800 square feet. A spokesperson for the Planning Department and the lawyer for the owner did not return requests for comment.
The group is supposed to meet again next month. Hughes said she’d feel differently if a neighbor was building his or her dream house, but this is just a developer intending to flip the property. And the city’s fine with it — even in a real estate market where it’s hard to find a singlefamily home for less than $2 million.
“I feel like it’s going to happen,” Hughes said. “There’s no way we make it so this house doesn’t get torn down and there’s a monster home there.”
And with it will go the memories of Lorraine Sherrill, who lived in the little house for decades. She died several years ago in her 80s, and her brother sold the home for $2.3 million in 2017.
Gone will be most of what neighbors called her “secret garden,” where she grew Swiss chard, asparagus and strawberries and let kids play and pick as much produce as they wanted. Imagine if her home’s replacement housed four families who couldn’t otherwise afford a home in San Francisco and four sets of kids to explore the part of the garden that’s left.