Housing at Hunters Point getting a rapid makeover
The dilapidated Alice Griffith housing project, across the way from soon-to-be-demolished Candlestick Park, is ready for its makeover.
Underground utility work and other street and surface preparation work is expected to begin by June, now that the city’s Community Investment and Infrastructure Commission has given its OK to the long-awaited rebuilding plan for the 256 public housing units.
“Rebuilding Alice Griffith Public Housing and redeveloping Candlestick Point is helping us deliver on our promise to make sure San Francisco remains a city for the 100 percent,” Mayor Ed Lee said in a statement Wednesday. The effort is part of a 30-year plan to develop the area around the stadium and the long-closed Hunters Point Naval Shipyard into a new city neighborhood with 12,000 homes, retail and office space, and parks and entertainment areas.
The plans call for the first of the new units to be built on publicly owned land at the intersection of Arelious Walker
Drive and Egbert Avenue, next to the existing housing project. Another 248 units of affordable housing will be included in that new construction. Residents of Alice Griffith will stay in their current homes until they can move directly into the new flats and townhomes of the mixed-income development.
There’s a tight deadline for much of the work. The Alice Griffith development received a $30.5 million federal grant in 2011 requiring that units built with that money be certified for occupancy by Sept. 20, 2016. Plans now call for construction of the first 184 units to begin next January, with work on 122 more slated to start by August 2015. The final 198 units have a December 2016 start date.
Sometime after 2016, work is expected to start of the final 706 units at the Alice Griffith site, which will include 382 market-rate homes and 324 units at below market rate.
“This is great news,” said Kofi Bonner, regional vice president of Lennar Urban, the overall developer of the shipyard project. “The city has told us they like our plan and we can move ahead.”
The commission also gave conceptual approval for a plan for 1.1 million square feet of mixed-use retail, entertainment and housing on the Candlestick Park site, although details are still to come.
— John Wildermuth School of the Arts: The San Francisco school board took a first look at an architect’s drawing of a new building that would house the Ruth Asawa School of the Arts at 135 Van Ness Ave., currently a run-down site in the middle of prime real estate.
For years, community groups and supporters of the school have pushed to move the campus to the Van Ness site, with voters even approving set-aside bond money to make that happen.
But there has never been enough money.
School district officials have estimated that seismically upgrading and renovating the site, which now houses administrative offices, while maintaining its historic architecture, would cost upward of $220 million.
The $15 million in the district’s bank account for the project is not even enough to break ground.
Yet district officials say that despite the fizzling out of previous efforts, it’s time to put up or shut up.
A proposed resolution pending before the school board would put in writing a commitment to make the project happen, stating “that the superintendent and the Board of Education will work together with partners from the public and private sectors using existing and new systems to bring this project to fruition, with a commitment to secure appropriate resources and to reaffirm our belief that the arts and culture are central to life in San Francisco, a city that values its young people as much as it reveres and celebrates creativity and the arts.”
Best-case scenario? The district would break ground in about five years, leaving the school at its current site in Diamond Heights.
— Jill Tucker