3822 24th Street circa 2012

From the listing of the little single-family home at 3822 24th Street which purchased for $759,000 in March of 2012 and didn’t include the lot next door:

“This SFR on 24th St in the heart of Noe Valley is a very special piece of SF real estate. The home features include period details with high ceilings, tremendous natural light as the property is detached on most of 4 sides, lovely tranquil garden, formal living room and dine in kitchen with deck off master bedroom into lovely garden.”

Since then, a five-story building has risen on the adjacent 3820 24th Street lot.

3822 24th Street circa 2015

And the buyers of 3822 24th street have requested permission to demolish their two-bedroom home and build a four-story-over-basement building, with five condos over a ground-floor retail space and parking for five bicycles, on the site.

Permits for the project, which were first filed back in February of 2014, have been awaiting the Planning Commission’s approval of the development, the hearing for which was originally scheduled for this week but has been pushed back to April 23.

68 thoughts on “Noe Valley Infill: Five Stories With Condos Over Retail On 24th”
  1. could they move the historic building? it’s just not appropriate density for such a lively corridor like 24th. I’m sure someone would love to have this home somewhere in the country or south bay. maybe they could work something out with the city and get a break if they save the historic structure.

    1. I think a lot of the detail on this structure has been stripped off and I imagine it has been a rental for some time

    2. This little house has zero historic value. It’s just an old Victorian era cottage. Demo it and build new housing and retail at this site. And yes with parking.

        1. What about the curb cut on the right and left hand side? Are those o.k. with you, or do you want those gone as well?

          1. The new building next door is 2 commercial, 4? residential and has no parking.

            [Editor’s Note: 3820 24th Street includes 5 residential units.]

          2. 3820 24th St only contains 3 residential units, not 5. You can see their plans at luxon24th(dot)com

            [Editor’s Note: Good catch, that’s definitely our mistake. We were working off an elevation of the building and missed the fact that 301 and 302 are multi-story units.]

          1. The problem is just in general that curb cuts on a pedestrian street suck. I used to walk here with my little kids and it is bad. As much as possible this needs to be avoided. If there is no side or alley access this might be housing best without parking.

          2. No, we can’t “all” agree on that. Pedestrian streets should not have curb cuts. Build the parking in another building on another street.

          3. They really should have combined the two lots and made one larger building with a curb cut. I have a small child and really don’t think that curb cuts are the end of the world — it is part of living in the city.

          4. “it’s part of living in a city”

            Um, not it’s not. Curb cuts are exceptionally rare in most cities in the world on pedestrian heavy streets.

          5. Most pedestrian-heavy areas in other cities have alleys, that provide car and service access.

        2. Curb cuts work fine in mixed use areas. 4-5 cars entering and leaving on any one day is hardly disruptive. Take the example farther up 24th next to Whole Foods. The building had residential above commercial with a curb cut for the below grade parking. On any given day only a few cars enter and leave, randomly. People wait, they pull in or out and life goes on.

          It works.

          1. Does not work well for families with small kids. Sure it is manageable here and there but if you repeat it over and over you no longer have a mixed use area

          2. the rest of the world seems to be able to live with the small inconvenience of the probability of having to wait 30 senconds for a car to pull in or out of driveway once every 2 months, but in SF we just cant handle anything that so dramatically disrupts our lives. the horror of having to wait

          3. Folks, if it was just this parcel then there would not be much to be concerned about. But it is every parcel along the upper 24th commercial zone that combines to create inefficient ped/car conflicts.

            This is a bad situation for everyone on the street. Obviously there’s the ped conflict at the curb cut. But there’s also the problem of a car on the street waiting for a gap in the ped traffic. While they’re waiting to turn into the driveway they’re holding up traffic behind them.

          4. moto – have you been outside the US? Most of the rest of the world absolutely does not allow curb cuts on pedestrian-heavy streets.

          5. funny you bring up whole foods as those curb cuts are probably the best example for zig’s point

          6. It’s not just the entering/exiting of vehicles that is problematic. It’s the issue of a) introducing a dead space in the commercial corridor which, especially during a bad economy, can influence vacancies in the adjacent retail spaces and blight b) removing an on-street parking space and c) reducing the amount of space available to install sidewalk amenities like seating, street trees, bike racks, etc.

          7. Joel is right – it’s all the friggin’ curb cuts in this City make street parking a nightmare, not some monstrous number of cars per se. I’d love to see homes in the Richmond and Sunset required to combine their curb cuts (i.e., with angled driveways), so as to free up more curb space.

            In this specific example, suppose they make a curb cut so that a future building can park 5 cars. That’s removing one (or more likely 2, because it will be badly spaced) street spaces – which see regular daily use and turnover – for the sake of parking 5 vehicles off-street – which 5 vehicles will only use that curb cut 2x a day at most. So 98% of the time, the former parking space (or spaces) sits unused and unusable.

          8. anon. i’ve been to 6 eu countries, latin american countries and 2 asian countries so far this year. yes, i travel a lot. many EU tcountries have extensive use of alleyways that we dont have.

            Have you ever been outside of US?

          9. moto – I live in Tokyo now, and have lived in Barcelona, London, Buenos Aires, and Paris in the past. None of those cities have extensive alleys (some alleys in newer areas, but they’re very, very, VERY rare), yet all manage to avoid curb cuts on heavy pedestrian streets.

            This isn’t hard, you simply ban curb cuts on pedestrian streets like 24th and have more curb cuts on streets like 23rd or 25th. Why is that impossible for “innovative” SF to do?

    3. Moving this house to the city limits would be enormously expensive, let along moving to Marin or Santa Clara counties. Santa Clara county already has its share of “unwanted” old vics which are routinely sold for $1 with the condition that the buyer has to move it off of the parcel. Often one dollar is not low enough to find a buyer.

      1. My father told me when we was a kid and they built 280 on his block they did sell the houses for $1 and they were dragging them down the street to open land further south

        I am sure now nobody wants a house like this

    4. According to the giant Planning Commission sign that has been erected in front of this home recently it is not considered a “historic resource” probably because most of the detail has been removed from the front facade. Still, if the inside is mostly intact, this lovely little Victorian will soon be dust.

  2. Noe has a 1.2+ car to household ratio on average and higher than that for non-rentals, such as these. 93% of owner-occupied housing units in Noe have at least one car and less than 40% of Noe housing is SFH. The CA car registration data doesn’t lag so much, and shows a slight increase in car ownership in SF since this Census data.

    One out of every four people in this area with a job, drive to work outside of SF. As I have explained before on SS, the 1989 quake and closing of the central fwy north of Market made Noe very desirable for people that commute to the valley. Just minutes away from both 101 and 280.

    Whatever your hopes for the future, it is unrealistic to expect that these 10 housing units with zero parking will not add to the parking congestion in the immediate neighborhood. One corner of their block is residential parking zone S and the other is zone Z. I wonder which one they ask to have expanded to cover them.

  3. This is why we have a housing shortage in SF. Over a year in Planning and probably still a long way to go until they can break ground. SF Planning Dept processes need a complete overhaul.

    1. The reason we have a housing shortage is not because of the Planning Commission or the time it takes to get a permit. We have a housing shortage due to Proposition M (look it up) passed by the voters in the 1980’s and because of neighborhoods like Noe Valley whose residents do not want high density housing and to keep the height limits at about 40 ft. even along transit corridors like 24th St.

  4. I have no idea why you’re equating any of this with “eco” this or “hipster” that Futurist. I’m just talking about cold, hard economic facts. You raise the price of something (time or money) and you get less of it at the margins. Period. Fact.

  5. Jake – There’s no question that it is likely that some residents of a garageless building will own cars anyway. Like any other residence without parking (including some homes that have been here over a century), there’s less incentive to own a car if you’ve got to deal with street parking. Yes, it will increase competition for on-street parking and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. There are a lot of people who only move their car once or twice a week on street cleaning days. As competition heats up some of these folks are going to realize that the hassle isn’t really worth the marginal utility of a rarely used car.

    Futurist – Ditto. Just because people want cars doesn’t mean that new projects need to accommodate more cars. If you want a car then get one. Onsite parking is not a requirement to own a car. And it seems a bit comical that you see a prestige car’s need to display their status as one of the reasons to degrade a busy street’s functionality.

    Anon1 – those stats only go up to 2000. There’s been a more concerted effort to get transit first and support for other modes of transportation off the ground since then. Even so its gonna take time. Most people won’t consider bicycling if their 40 block long daily commute includes 4 blocks of white knuckle hell. Unfortunately that’s the situation on the ground today and until it is fixed a lot of people won’t bike. And transit of course really needs some improvement. Even though we’ve had transit lanes for years, Muni is just now considering using bus video to ticket transit lane abusers who slow bus traffic and cause delays and clumping.

    1. can you explain why cycling has not increased over the past few years in portland as the amount of bike lanes has increased? it looks like they reached a max that new bike lanes doesnt raise

      1. Read my comment to Anon1 above. Gaps in the infrastructure (example: the 4 blocks mentioned) keep the meeker cyclists in their cars.

        We’re at the tail end of a half century of autos-first street planning. That’s going to take a while to mitigate. Have some patience.

        1. my question is: why has the % of people in portland who commute via cycling stalled even as more and more bike infrastructure has been added.?

          the “if you build it, they will come” mentality hasnt worked there. why do you think its going to work here.?

          1. I’m having deja vu. Didn’t we already discuss the Portland situation a few weeks ago?

            How much traffic does a halfway constructed bridge attract?

          2. Moto Mayhem is right, at a certain point, bike usage becomes flat or declines. Plenty of articles about many different cities have shown this, check out the “Atlantic Cities” site. There are only so many people who can take advantage of cycling as an option for their commute. There is a reason the MTA is not releasing the bike count, and they are probably busy right now trying to adjust numbers to save themselves from embarrassment.

            As an architect, I am visiting clients and project sites throughout the greater Bay Area on a weekly basis. I cannot cycle from a client meeting Palo Alto back to our office in Sausalito, or cycle from Sausalito up to a job site in Calistoga. I live in the Marina, and there are SOME days during good weather when I have used my bike to go to work and back, but this happens maybe 15 times a year.

          3. Anon1 – What? You mean a percentage trend cannot keep going up forever, past 100%? Whoa! Next you’re going to break the mind blowing news that the sky is blue.

            Of course not everyone’s going to ride a bike. No-one expects that. But there’s plenty of opportunity to increase the number of bicyclists in SF and the greater Bay Area. We’re nowhere near reaching the horizontal asymptote.

          4. “We’re nowhere near reaching the horizontal asymptote.”

            how do you know that?

          5. Because there are many developed world cities orders of magnitude higher than us. Why do you think that we are close to it?

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