Having quietly acquired the Dogpatch parcel upon which Café Cocomo currently stands, Build Inc. is moving forward with plans to build 120 new apartments and a cafe at 650 Indiana Street.
A mid-block alley would sit between the two proposed five-story buildings designed by two different architects, providing access to underground parking for 85 cars and 120 bikes.
And at the southern end of the development, the dead end spur of 19th Street would become a 8,900 square foot public art space, the proposed “Decompression Plaza.”
If all goes as planned, the site should be approved for development by early 2014.
∙ Café Cocomo’s Dancing Days Are Numbered, Condos Coming Soon? [SocketSite]
∙ Plans For 120 New Condos Where Café Cocomo Stands (Or Shakes) [SocketSite]
∙ 650 Indiana [Build Inc.]
Are 85 parking spaces for 120 units sufficient at this location? There is not much public transit nearby.
Not much public transportation? The T-Third is 3 blocks away, and I think 22 runs right by here.
caltrain is also *right* there. the 48 goes there too. lots of transit actually.
thank you for ridding the city of the drug infested den that is cafe cocomo.
and no, there is not enough parking
Should be more parking for these units.
Nothing like a “Decompression Plaza” on the shoulder of a freeway.
But great project. Build, baby, build!
And the march to generic, tasteless, cheap sterility continues. What will the soulless, carpetbagging develop-pimps do when this bubble pops, and you can no longer lay waste to the city like Grant on his march?
Cocomo was indeed a “drug infested den”…and now that activity and some unsavory characters have migrated to SOMA clubs. Why is it that very little in the way of impact analysis is required for clubs opening up? Particularly for the “mega clubs” that hold hundreds of people?
For me, personally, I would want parking in this location. Not so much for commute, because it is well served by the T-third for downtown, or Caltrain for Peninsula. But I would feel a bit isolated in Dogpatch without ready access to a car to get to other parts of the City in the evening.
But I’m not everyone, and if the developer feels they can make a go of it with less parking, it’s OK with me. Certainly Dogpatch and Mission Bay are building up and the whole area is feeling less isolated.
I work in the dogpatch and take the T most weekdays. The T is a poor excuse for a train – it’s smelly and on ballgame days, takes over an hour to get where it’s going. But there’s no parking here anymore either.
The dogpatch suffers from the same malady as the rest of the city, it doesn’t matter what transit is available, if you do dinner and a movie, there’s no way to get home easily – might as well catch the busses that run at 5:30am, you’ll get home at about the same time. Transit until 2:30am on weekends should be the rule.
And as for parking, there are hundreds of small businesses, including us, along 3rd st (and that in the american industrial center alone) and we have vendors and customers visiting – often from the south bay or oakland/emeryville. It’s not just that there’s no street parking, we can’t even pay for easy garage parking. These people are coming from places where taking the train isn’t a normal way of life and I’m not going to make a director at Genetech deal with the filth that’s the T-line, even if they were willing to give it a try. Much of this anti-car and anti garage sentiment is by people who really don’t live in the real world.
Why does EVERYTHING proposed for Potrero and Dogpatch have to look like crap live/work design from the 1990’s?
“Much of this anti-car and anti garage sentiment is by people who really don’t live in the real world.”
Understatement of the year. And the royal family of not living in the real world is the Board of Stuporvisors. “Transit first… or later… or whatever. But transit!”
“Much of this anti-car and anti garage sentiment is by people who really don’t live in the real world.”
Exactly, spot on! You need a car to get groceries, go to other areas in the city with your dog (not allowed on Muni), leave town, etc. Local business need parking too!
^^^ Agree with this one!
“Exactly, spot on! You need a car to get groceries, go to other areas in the city with your dog (not allowed on Muni), leave town, etc. Local business need parking too!”
I can assure there are and have always been well off people in SF who don’t own cars. I am related to some.
You have a suburban mentality based on where you grew up
I guess my friends must not eat, take their dogs anywhere, or ever leave town. It’s weird, because they eat food at home sometimes, and do take their dogs places, leave town, and yet they don’t own cars. And I guess those dogs I see on Muni are not dogs, perhaps they are just small, furry, misshapen people.
It must be all in my imagination, as asd says it’s impossible and there’s no way that could be a false statement.
http://www.sfmta.com/getting-around/accessibility/animals-muni
Makes you wonder who’s actually living in the real world
Now I understand why I’m so hungry. That Safeway truck that has been dropping off stuff at my door for years isn’t actually giving me groceries! I have to have a car to get groceries. Doh. The things that you learn on Socketsite.
Seriously, who wants to load truck their own groceries up and down stairs, etc. Go delivery and you’ll never go back.
if you do dinner and a movie, there’s no way to get home easily
uber.com
Trust me, it’s pretty dang easy.
And now back to development and designs above, or even the availability of public transportation within the neighborhood, but not whether or not one needs a car in general…
The car zealots want to force the developer to build more parking than the developers desire to subsidize their filthy, disgusting and dangerous lifestyle? Shame on them! Thankfully the vast majority of San Franciscans are more environmentally minded than that and want to leave a better planet for our children.
I think the development is fine, more of this please. Middle class housing is not going to be architecturally spectacular, that is just not how it works. There are already too many hoops to jump through for developers, which drive up the costs. These are designed as rentals, right?
Really, a director at Genentech won’t take the T but the physicians/scientists at Mission Bay will?
I know a couple of folks that walk from the Espirit across the street to their job in SOMA. There are also the cyclists, and yes, when it rains, they’ll jump on the T. psst, I even know folks that’ll walk in the rain with umbrellas…..Heck, if you’re afraid of using the T, you can actually jump on Caltrain instead to go to Safeway and back.
and there’s actually a thing called zipcars that 20 and 30 somethings use.
The “T” (as in MBTA?) is in another city far, far away. There is, allegedly, public transit in this city, but it pales in comparison to the T… Which in and of itself is not a high bar for a major city.
“subsidize their filthy, disgusting and dangerous lifestyle”
Uh, NoeValleyJim, in another post regarding a listing in Noe Valley yesterday you mentioned that you yourself owned and used your car.
Are you therefore contributing to the “disgusting and dangerous lifestyle”?
Is this a case of “Do as I say, NOT as I do”?
@ NVJ: more and more it seems you are going off the deep end, without any balance to your opinions.
So calling someone who owns and uses a car their “filthy, disgusting and dangerous lifestyle..” is really appropriate and adding intelligence to this conversation?
Posturing and preaching like that, with such bitterness, is seriously not interesting. Maybe separate your anger from the facts?
Do you dispute that car exhaust is filthy Futurist? Have you become a follower of Rush Limbaugh and are now a global warming denialist? Have you decided that automobile exhaust is a sweet ambrosia to you?
Do you dispute that automobiles are dangerous and kill 250,000 people worldwide annually and injure seriously at least 10 times that?
@NVJ – If you hate cars and all their associated problems why do you own and use a vehicle yourself as you mentioned on other threads? Is your point that you are against more cars coming to the city including to projects like this because it creates more traffic congestion for when you use your vehicle? Or are you planning on getting rid of your car, as well as the rest ours as well?
This reminds me of an issue we had at our vacation home in Mammoth Lakes where everyone with fireplaces wanted to stop additional fireplace units in the village for pollution reasons, BUT, they were unwilling to suspend usage of their own existing fireplaces to help get rid of winter smoke pollution problems.
I have already explained this before anon2, but perhaps you are a new poster or missed it. I did not own a car at all for over 15 years, but after SFUSD gave my daughter a school assignment to a location that I could not physically bicycle with my daughter on the back (it is too steep) we bought a car. I have driven less than 1000 miles over the last decade and avoid driving as much as possible. How many miles have you driven over the last 10 years anon2?
1000 miles per decade?
Why not just take a taxi?
That would cost about $4500 … and you could then still claim an unblemished non-driving record.
If only everybody’s life could be so simple.
Or… if you think its absolutely necessary to have a car, you could always not live here!
While NVJim plans his move to wonderfully car-free and socially equitable Pyongyang, perhaps the rest of us could just focus on discussing matters of city planning in the real world.
Why isn’t public transit an option? Now poor NoeValleyJim is getting a taste of what it is like when others dictate how you should live. I ride a bike and Muni, but have no problem with buildings having private parking and people using cars.
This reminds me of the pictures posted on SFGate of the city transit officials who showed up to the Polk Street bike lane meeting in city owned vehicles instead of walking , riding or taking public transit . It’s the San Francisco way I guess.
Public transit would be an option if it were fast, reliable, safe and clean. Muni is 0 for 4 on those criteria. Now can we please move on?
We carpool with other parents, so the once a week routine involves picking up three other children and dropping them off too. I don’t think that this would really work in a cab, plus the kids would end up riding without a booster seat. I know that is legal but some parents would object.
It is pretty funny PolkGulch somehow has decided that letting a developer build only 85 parking space in his building is “dictating how others should live”. Don’t like to live in a building without a dedicated parking space? Don’t buy one! No one is forcing you to do anything, you are the one trying to force the developer to build parking that he doesn’t want.
You really have no problem with global warming? You don’t mind leaving a heavily polluted planet with rising sea levels for the next generation?
Why don’t you just contract with a Townncar service to do this? Buying a car for that sole purpose is unfathomable.
Not as unfathomable as city owned vehicles used for staff so they can avoid MUNI and park in restricted street zones not available to tax payers. As mentioned earlier, SFGate had an article about how AQMD and SFMTA officials showed up to sell removing parking on Polk Street to neighbors in cars owned by their agencies. Their offices are only about 15 blocks south and they really couldn’t take a bus or walk? MeterMadness had an article showing pictures of all the government vehicles parked in various loading zones, no parking zones and even handicapped zones outside the meeting.
And I’m sorry but I’m censorious of the person who claims the car is for the children only. Families with children need something besides a bike to haul the large amount of groceries.
The answer is, stop punishing other drivers who maybe have cars “for the children” also, and instead start becoming an advocate to FIX MUNI instead.
Removing parking is not going to add one bus, train or subway line to this city. Besides, the SFMTA and MUNI would not be able to exist without fees generated from parking fines, parking meters and city owned parking lots. (Don’t believe me, look it up on their own website)
The LA times has addressed NVJ’s limited car lifestyle as “We have a bit of a different culture here that kind of frowns on that,” he said. “We don’t wear Prada, and we’ll drive a Porsche but not one we own. Who wants to own a car? We drive Porsches on track days at Laguna Seca.” So San Francisco
Removing parking is not going to add one bus, train or subway line to this city.
Um, it may not add an actual bus, but it will add the number of times that a bus can complete its route. If a bus can go faster, that means more runs and less waiting, and an improved Muni.
Besides, the SFMTA and MUNI would not be able to exist without fees generated from parking fines, parking meters and city owned parking lots. (Don’t believe me, look it up on their own website)
Hogwash. Yes, Muni gets some money from fines and meters (though not really all that much in the whole scheme of things). That just happens to be the current funding mechanism, but that could be changed any time. It’s like saying that the federal government wouldn’t exist without some specific tax. Of course it would, it would just change where the money comes from.
Well, I’ll all for fixing MUNI and one doesn’t have to have children to be in favor of that.
But the answer isn’t to start punishing bike riders and insisting that grocery shopping necessitates driving a privately-owned and operated car.
The answer is a cargo bike. The xtracycle from Cargo Joe was the single best durable good I’ve purchased in the last five years, but there are other brands and models to choose from.
@anon…..The point is that just removing parking will not force people to give up their cars if there is no good transit alternative. Right now you could remove every single parking space from San Francisco and we would still not have the subway lines needed for the northern or western neighborhoods. Many of us have lived in other cities without cars (London and Chicago in my case), but in San Francisco I need a car to get to various appointments in locations underserved by so call “rapid” transit.
^The point of removing parking has nothing to do with people “giving up cars”, it has to do with managing traffic on the street.
anon: so by building new condos with less parking, people from the east bay, peninsula, and Marin will no longer drive to SF?
^Fewer of them will, yes. It’s basic economics. If you make less of something, it becomes more expensive. When something becomes more expensive, people consume less of it (all else being equal).
Unless the contention is that parking is some type of inelastic good (it’s not).
Parking lots are closing left and right and the price of parking has quadrupled downtown, but traffic is worse than it has ever been.
The contention is that traffic is a negative externality imposed on this city largely by commuters and not residents.
Unless you plan to tear down the existing garages and lots frequented by commuters, building new condos with less parking spots will do nothing to reduce traffic and congestion. Literally tens of thousands of people from other parts of the bay area drive in/out of SF every day for work or fun. Limiting parking in new developments like this may put a few less cars on the roads at the margin, at best, but will have no meaningful impact on absolute traffic levels.
“When Metro allowed developers to build apartment buildings without any parking in districts near railway stations, Ms Bennett recalls, existing residents “went bananas” at the prospect that parking spaces on the street might get harder to find.” Residents already were fed up with suburban commuters taking up street parking before the new housing was proposed.
(Biking and Hiking, But No Parking” The Economist Magazine-July 27, 2013)
Why is transit not more popular? ”
“According to the latest American Community Survey data, the average work trip by people driving alone in Portland is 23.6 minutes, while the average transit commute trip is 43.8 minutes.”
“Since 1980, before the first rail line was opened, transit’s share of work trip travel in the metropolitan area has declined by one-quarter, from 8.4 percent to 6.3 percent. Overall, the share of travel by car remains about the same as before the first light rail line opened” http://www.newgeography.com/content/003849-portland-s-transit-halcyon-days
@anon- your theory of mode shift has been tried and it is a failure.
^Um, no. I said absolutely nothing about mode shift.
I said that eliminating parking will lead to fewer cars on the streets. That could come from many different places, and doesn’t need to come from mode shift.
@LegacyDude – we weren’t talking about parking in new developments, but removing street parking from an existing area. Removing parking that is used by out of neighborhood residents will lead to fewer folks coming. Now – there are reasons that we may WANT those people coming, but that’s beside the point. There are people here claiming that eliminating parking will have no effect on the number of cars entering the neighborhood, which conflicts with basic common sense (pretty sure the merchants would disagree too).
@CentralPlanning – your name is especially hilarious considering the quote that you chose. Portland did nothing to force developers to build less parking – they simply allowed developers to build less or no parking near train stations (see your quote for reference).
I suppose that you think that this is bad? The city should have central planning to force developers to build more parking than they’d like? lol
anon, you seem to enjoy obfuscating issues and dancing around the salient topics here. Here are the key points most of us are trying to make:
1) Traffic sucks because of commuters, not residents.
2) Recent reductions in public parking have not improved traffic.
3) Future reductions in new condo parking will not improve traffic.
4) Muni generally sucks, and less parking will not make it faster. The only way to make Muni faster is to put more trains underground. Everything else is a band-aid or misdirected public policy.
Tsk tsk, Legacy Dude. You don’t bring facts to a religious argument. Haven’t you learned anything?
Traffic sucks because of commuters, not residents.
Generally speaking, yes. As discussed before, even resident parking is fungible. More parking = more cars than otherwise would be there. Do you dispute this?
Recent reductions in public parking have not improved traffic.
Says who? SF has gained 100,000 people since the lull just after 2000. Shouldn’t we expect traffic to be far worse just from population growth? Human population has grown significantly more than auto population (source: census factfinder) from 2000 to 2010, where both tracked at similar trend levels from 1970-1980, 1980-1990 and 1990-2000.
Future reductions in new condo parking will not improve traffic
Again, the point is not to “improve” traffic from the baseline, but to keep it from getting worse. I don’t understand why this is hard to understand. No one is expecting folks to give up cars – we’re just expecting that a reduction in the amount of parking built changes the mix of new housing purchasers. Census data shows this to be 100% true. Feel free to present data showing the opposite.
Muni generally sucks, and less parking will not make it faster. The only way to make Muni faster is to put more trains underground. Everything else is a band-aid or misdirected public policy.
True. A way to make it slower is to allow traffic to get worse though. Again, the goal is not improvement, but rather to halt things from getting worse.
Tsk tsk, Legacy Dude. You don’t bring facts to a religious argument. Haven’t you learned anything?
I didn’t see anything sourced in Legacy Dude’s argument, where my argument uses facts directly from the census bureau.