City eyes Chinatown restaurant
Lee seeks supes’ OK to purchase New Asia for affordable housing
In the year before her death in September, Chinatown activist Rose Pak developed something of an obsession with the New Asia restaurant on Pacific Avenue. She knew the property was coming on the market and thought the city should grab it for affordable housing.
She brought it up repeatedly with Mayor Ed Lee. She mentioned it to Supervisor Aaron Peskin. She badgered city housing staffers about it.
Now, seven months after she died at age 69, Pak’s wish is coming true. Peskin said he and Lee plan to introduce a resolution at the Board of Supervisors next week authorizing the city’s Real Estate Division to spend $5 million to purchase 772 Pacific Ave., home of New Asia, which is owned by Han So.
“Rose spent her entire life looking out for Chinatown, and it’s almost like this is her parting gift to the community,” said Malcolm Yeung, deputy director of the Chinatown Community Development Center.
The property could accommodate as many as 80 small, affordable housing units, or from 50 to 60 larger family-size apartments. Any project there would include a new home for the restaurant, which is the biggest banquet hall in Chinatown.
The property has been in limbo for 18 months, when the family that owns the property made it clear that it would be sold. The Mayor’s Office of Housing and Community Development had to move quickly to ensure that the site wasn’t sold to
a market-rate developer.
Jeff Buckley, senior adviser to Lee on housing issues, said the deal is rare because the property will continue to generate income during the entitlement process, which could take several years. The restaurant pays $22,500 a month in rent and has about five years left on its lease. The city could use that money to help New Asia relocate during construction and to fund some of the preconstruction costs for the affordable housing development, Buckley said.
The sale comes at a time when the banquet business has been gradually migrating to new and larger dim sum palaces with ample parking in suburbs such as Millbrae and Burlingame. One of Chinatown’s landmark restaurants, the Empress of China, closed a little more than two years ago.
But business at the New Asia has remained brisk. Peskin, who represents the neighborhood, called the New Asia “the most viable banquet hall in Chinatown.”
“I’ve always looked at New Asia as more than a restaurant,” Yeung said. “It’s a legacy business. It’s an employment center. It’s one of the few larger dim sum restaurants regularly patronized by residents and community stakeholders, not just tourists.”
Besides the 84-unit International Hotel development on Kearny Street, the only new affordable housing in the neighborhood in recent years has been on the edge of Chinatown along Broadway, where several parcels were freed up after the Embarcadero Freeway was torn down. Otherwise, Chinatown offers few sites as large as the New Asia property, which is 9,200 square feet.
That was a point Pak made with some frequency, Peskin said.
“Rose was on this in a major way,” said Peskin. “In Chinatown there are only a handful of soft sites where the opportunity exists to build affordable housing, and this is one of them.” J.K. Dineen is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: jdineen@ sfchronicle.com Twitter: @sfjkdineen