Big SoMa project on track for first vote
5M looking for balance, community acceptance
In today’s San Francisco, where political priorities and design principles are often at odds, it’s no surprise that downtown’s largest development proposal is being prodded from all sides.
The project in question covers 4 acres, with three towers that would rise behind The Chronicle at Fifth and Mission streets. The lead developer is Forest City, which has been working on the proposal since 2008 with Hearst Corp., owner of the land and publisher of The Chronicle and SFGate.com.
The site is big. The buildings would be tall, in a part of town where lower heights are the norm. That doesn’t preclude large-scale change, but the city and the developers need to focus on the planning details so we’re not confronted with an imposition that shows the strain of trying to be all things to all people.
As the push for approvals begins — the first vote is scheduled for early next month at the Planning Commission — the project that the
developers call 5M is being billed as nothing less than “a new typology for urban density that combines highly diverse building types with an active and interconnected civic realm.”
The latter phrase translates to a variety of spaces threading through the site, including the rooftop of The Chronicle and a pedestrian alley off Mission Street that would lead to a clearing in the heart of the block.
“We see the alleyways as the spine to the project,” said Laura Crescimano of San Francisco’s Sitelab Urban Studio, which is part of the design team along with local landscape architect Tom Leader and the New York architecture firm Kohn Pederson Fox Associates. “We’re trying to create a network of open spaces that feel like SoMa, rather than a single space facing a busy street, and a density that’s more like downtown.”
That’s for sure.
470-foot condo tower
On Mission Street, due west of The Chronicle, there would be a 200-foot-tall apartment block. To the south, along Fifth Street, a 470-foot condominium tower would occupy the middle of the block. Below it, stretching from the corner along Howard Street, would be a broad slab of offices with top heights of 350 feet to the east and 395 feet to the west.
In the Financial District, towers of this scale wouldn’t stand out. But the blocks west of Yerba Buena Gardens are a low-slung landscape where squat housing complexes from the past 15 years rub against older industrial buildings. The only high-rise south of Mission Street in this area is the 340-foot Intercontinental hotel, which opened in 2008 on a corner previously zoned for just 160 feet — the height limit that applies to most of the 5M site, stepping down to 85 feet where the office tower is proposed.
2 towers 55 feet apart
Another difference is that the two tallest towers would be allowed to nudge within 55 feet of each other, though the average distance between them must be no less than 75 feet. By comparison, the recent towers on Rincon Hill near the Bay Bridge are required to stand 115 feet apart.
A rationale for clustering the tallest towers at the southeast corner of the block is that this will lessen the wind gusts on the rest of the site while protecting views south from Powell Street. This also keeps new development away from the block’s older structures: two small masonry buildings inside the block and the clock towered home of The Chronicle, which has been altered over the years but is identified by the developers as a “cultural legacy.”
These are substantial changes, and they explain why the various approvals are being bundled into a package that will require a yes-or-no from the Board of Supervisors as well as the Planning Commission. More than aesthetics is involved: Developers dangle the carrot that if 5M contains all of the 1.7 million square feet of space that’s proposed, it could generate $73 million in impact fees and community benefits. That includes 212
Unlikely alliance
units of affordable housing to accompany the project’s 630 market-rate apartments and condominiums.
But critics say the payoff isn’t worth the social and physical cost.
At a Planning Commission presentation last month, tenant advocates formed an unlikely alliance with owners of condos at the SoMa Grand tower at Seventh and Mission streets — built during the last boom — to demand that the new buildings fit within the existing zoning code. This would cut the project’s square footage by more than 50 percent.
“Displacement and gentrification ... those are key things that this body should be looking at,” said Angelica Cabande of the nonprofit South of Market Community Action Network. “You’re asking us to ‘take one for the team, suck it up people, so we can get more fees for the city.’ ”
Planning staff has met with the developers for more than five years and seems comfortable with the proposed towers and how they would be clustered. But several commissioners voiced surprise at the emphatic opposition. Commission President Rodney Fong took note of the gap between the friends and foes of 5M and said, “Maybe somewhere in the middle there’s a balance.”
While it won’t be easy to find, Fong is right.
There’s a lot to like in the conceptual plans for 5M. They’re in sync with the 21st century appeal of intimate public spaces amid large-scale urbanity.
There’s also no denying the awkwardness, on the ground and in the air, of thick highrises staking claim to the Fifth and Howard corner. They’d be abrupt signposts of the new economy within a stone’s throw of the single-roomoccupancy hotels along Sixth Street.
It doesn’t help that the office block — supposedly to be shaped and skinned in such a way that it resembles two towers — is overstuffed. Instead of “every inch a proud and soaring thing,” the goal for tall buildings spelled out in 1896 by legendary Chicago architect Louis Sullivan, the current renderings show a loudly tailored slab that wouldn’t fool anyone.
Zoning dates to 1985
But we shouldn't fill the 5M site with buildings that conform to current zoning, which dates back to 1985. It would be a downtown version of Mission Bay, planned in the 1990s with a 160-foot height limit so as not to crowd the views from Potrero Hill. That approach has translated to blocks of mid-rise mediocrity — and 5M’s 4 acres aren’t spacious enough, if built to code, to allow for the public space and historic preservation aspects that have won support from such groups as Todco, a nonprofit that develops and manages affordable housing in the area.
With all the changes ahead for San Francisco, and the wisdom of locating housing and jobs near BART and Muni, the ambitious scale of 5M makes sense. But the end result needs to feel like a dynamic outgrowth of its surroundings — rather than a real estate deal writ large.
“We’re trying to create a network of open spaces that feel like SoMa, rather than a ... density that’s more like downtown.” Laura Crescimano, Site lab Urban Studio, part of the design team