Building a new mix for public housing
S.F. redevelopment to include marketrate units
“I know how much it matters that we deliver on our promises to make things better for those who are too often overlooked in this city.” London Breed, San Francisco mayor
Crews arrived this week in Potrero Hill to start building the infrastructure for the next phase of Rebuild Potrero, a 25year plan to replace the eastern San Francisco neighborhood’s 619 public housing units with new apartments and nearly triple the density by adding almost 1,100 new homes.
In a city struggling with a housing shortage, the $29 million in infrastructure work is hard for some people to get excited about. The laying of water lines, sewer mains and fiberoptic utilities is hardly creating a place you can lay your head at night.
But for residents of the neighborhood’s 80yearold public housing atop Potrero Hill, the infrastructure around 26th and Connecticut streets is a big deal. For decades the neighborhood has been a symbol of neglect. The potholed streets are all dead ends, disconnected and isolated from the grid of the mostly affluent surrounding neighborhood. Sewer backups are common, along with leaky pipes, moldy walls and lousy cell phone reception.
Eric Shaw, director of the Mayor’s Office of Housing and Community Development, said beautifully designed buildings and wellplanned community spaces won’t work “unless you have good bones to flesh out.”
“You have to have the infrastructure in order to build the community you want to create,” he said. “You have to have the architecture piece, you have to have the social piece, you have to have the street trees and sidewalks, but nothing happens until unless what is in the ground is done right.”
The Potrero redevelopment is one of four projects by Hope SF, a multibilliondollar program that
will eventually tear down and rebuild 1,894 public housing units, while adding 3,226 apartments and condos, a mix of affordable and marketrate homes. The plan will transform four of the city’s most neglected communities — Sunnydale, Hunters View, Alice Griffith and Potrero Terrace and Annex.
At Potrero, the first phase, completed in June of 2019, was a 72unit apartment building at 1101 Connecticut St. That new building, on a vacant lot, was filled with residents who were housed in eight former Navy barracks in the 4acre lot at 26th and Connecticut. Once those residents moved into the new building, it cleared the way for the demolition of the old barracks, which will be replaced by about 350 units, 157 of them replacement housing.
The 4acre, twobuilding project on Connecticut Street will be the first new San Francisco public housing complex to share a site with a market rate structure, which will put lowincome families sidebyside with households paying $4,000 a month or more.
Bridge Housing Vice President of Development Marie Debor, who is overseeing the project, said that the public housing replacement construction will start this year and the market rate project in 2022. She said the market rate portion, which could have as many as 230 apartments, could include some units affordable to low or moderateincome families.
Theo Miller, who heads the Hope SF program, said the goal is to make the market rate and affordable buildings as similar as possible. The affordable building will have a gym, play area, day care center and community meeting rooms.
“The market rate building might have fancier bells and whistles, like marble counter tops, to attract that customer base,” he said. “But we stand by our extraordinarily welldesigned, highquality Hope SF units.”
While some residents are apprehensive that mixing highincome residents into the community will result in displacement, several residents who relocated to the new building at 1001 Connecticut say it’s a vast improvement.
“I love it,” said Micah Conway, a security guard and aspiring filmmaker who lives at 1001 Connecticut. “A clean, safe place to raise your family? Man. It’s a big change from the previous building. They were 80yearold army barracks with some walls put up to section them off into apartments. This is 2021. They say San Francisco is this center of innovation — except for the public housing. The old place was the opposite of modern.”
Jeris Woodson, a social worker whose family has lived in the Potrero Annex for 50 years, said she is looking forward to moving into a new building, but her older aunt is comfortable where she is and not looking forward to the relocation. “It’s run down here. There is mold inside some of the buildings, severe plumbing issues now and again.”
Woodson said she is worried the marketrate building will be far superior than the replacement units for existing families, and that the newcomers might disrupt what has always been a tightknit neighborhood.
“They are claiming that it will be mixed income and all the units will be the same,” she said. “That is what they are promising, but that is not how it usually goes.”
Mayor London Breed, who was raised in the Western Addition’s Plaza East public housing development, said that she understands the skepticism of longtime residents.
“As someone who grew up in public housing and has seen the pain caused by broken promises of the past, I know how much it matters that we deliver on our promises to make things better for those who are too often overlooked in this city,” she said.