Having purchased the two-unit building with two adjacent vacant lots at 1463-1465 Lombard Street between Franklin and Van Ness for $2,100,000 this past June, the buyers are working on plans to demolish the building, merge the lots and build a four-story building with nine condos, nine parking spaces and 600 square feet of commercial space on the ground floor.
I have always been surprised at the nature of development on Lombard. There must be quite a bit of development potential. Would planning make it difficult to redevelop a motel?
Call me a YIMBY, but I’ve always thought Lombard could support far higher than the 4 story moratorium for the rest of the Marina. I wouldn’t mind 6-7 stories, at least.
4 stories and 9 condos??? it should be like 8-10 stories with like 50-60 condos! come on!
I could see justifying 50-60 condos on site if there was adequate mass transit in the area, like, oh I don’t know, maybe extending the Central Subway through North Beach and under Lombard to the Presidio. But, SF doesn’t work that way…and probably never will…therefore, we get 9 cookie-cutter condos.
No way that Marina residents would ever welcome a subway unless it could be built with zero impact above ground. In other words, never going to happen, regardless of whether there was money for it or not. People are completely unwilling to deal with a couple years of construction.
@anon: yep, NIMBY-itis at its worst. However, given the advances of deep tunnel boring techniques a subway could be built with minimal surface impact (aside from stations).
“People are completely unwilling to deal with a couple years of construction.”
Are there really people so shortsighted and self interested that they think a couple of years of inconvenience are more important than decades or centuries of improved transit service? If so they should be excluded from the decision process. Or at least laughed out of the room.
^Um, yes, there are such people. As exhibit one, I present to you the Geary Blvd Merchant’s Association.
There are also many folks that I’ve met personally – I even had a guy explain it to me in detail once. Went something like this:
“I’m 63 years old, with maybe 15 years of quality life left. You think that I want 10-20% of my remaining life filled with construction noise? Build it after I’m gone.”
Yeah like the rich people who live behind Lombard on Pac Heights are going to let a 10 story building block their views…
“Build it after I’m (elder resident) gone.”
… when the baton is passed to the next elder resident can keep the complaint alive. Forever Don’t fix anything so long as someone nearby with limited lifetime left would be impacted.
You’d think that wisdom accumulates with age.
(I’ll be happy just to reach the end before the demand for Soylent Green rises above what the oceans can deliver. 🙂
With barely 150 years since the very first mass transit systems were developed, it is probably too early to access the impact of wealthy portions of cities resisting mass transit in their neighborhoods.
But it would be facinating to see if some posh portion of London that originally resisted the tube subsequently declined in value where poorer areas that got the tube have since gentrified.