1075 Folsom Street Site

Plans to raze the two-story First California Press building at 1075 Folsom Street and construct a six-story building, with 34 condos over a ground floor commercial space, have been submitted to San Francisco’s Planning Department for review.

1075 Folsom Street Design

As designed by Forum Design, the proposed development would rise across the 1075 Folsom Street site, the adjacent 1089 Folsom Street parcel and the 40 Cleveland Street parcel behind, upon which a four-story wing and entrance to the development’s garage (15 cars, 3 motorcycles and 40 bikes) would be built.

1075 Folsom Street Design: Cleveland Street Facade

First California Press, a commercial printer, has occupied the 1075 Folsom Street building, which has been identified as a potential Historic Resource for the West SoMa Light Industrial and Residential District, since 1967.  Plans to develop the Folsom Street site were proposed ten years ago but never got off the ground.

28 thoughts on “Folsom Street Rising: From Printing Presses To Condos As Proposed”
    1. “More skilled working-class jobs eliminated, awesome.” in an industry that has one foot on the banana skin and one foot in the grave. These jobs will be replaced by even more skilled construction jobs, in the short run, and in the long run we will be providing more housing in an under-housed City. The glass is half full. And by the way, the unemployment rate in SF is about 3.5% which is essentially full employment.

        1. Then let’s give housing subsidies to teachers! This is how you can still have teachers in Paris.

          Why do we have to make things so complicated? Want to keep certain people inside a city? Help them stay and put your money where your mouth is.

          1. No, I do not agree, we should not give housing subsidies to teachers. We should pay teachers more so that they can afford to live in market rate housing.

          2. Just My Opinion,

            This is a financing issue.

            Say a teacher makes 50K and to live in the City you need 100K. 2 people making 100K each together can pay the 5K rent to have a decent life. But 2 teachers can only afford 3K.

            You have 2 solutions:

            1 – Increase the paycheck of the teachers from 50K to 100K. For a couple this would cause an increase of 100K in salary.
            2 – Help the teachers and give them the 2K/month they need to afford the 5K rent. This means a 24K subsidy. That’s 4 times cheaper than increasing salaries, and takes care of the moral hazard of radically changing the local pay scale. Teachers from other cities would rush to SF for the good pay, and live in the ‘burbs! Good quality teachers from outside would compete with the SF teachers and put many out of a job, making their situation even worse.

            Beware of heavy-handed social engineering. People are not stupid and do not behave the way we want them to behave.

          3. I’ll add that rent subsidy already have their pitfall. What I see in Paris: almost all of my tenants collect rent subsidy, and this makes the rent I collect around 30% higher than without it. I am a bloody subsidized landlord! The market has a way to adjust to subsidies, which is why an ad-hoc approach would have to be implemented. Wanna help teachers? Help teachers.

          4. I’ve always thought that public housing projects should be built with 30-40% housing for the poor and 70-60% housing for teachers, police, and firefighters.

            But no one listens to me.

  1. San Fonzi: I do not think that a teacher, who is a professional with a masters degree, should have to take a hand-out from the government to make their rent. They should be paid appropriately for the value that they bring to their communities, no matter where they live. I’d like if they lived in the community but would not really care if they did not, provided our SF kids were getting the highest quality education available. This IMO is not a housing issue, it is probably a (sexist) hold-over from another time when women who worked had limited choices and were teachers, nurses or secretaries who were not paid what they were worth. I guess my point is that we need to, using your words, radically change the pay scale for teachers. Think of the quality choices that we would have if, again as you put it, “teachers would flock to SF”.

    1. Teachers can get roommates if they want to live in SF. Lots of people have roommates. No one is owed anything, anywhere.

    2. Teachers are public employees. If you pay them enough more to allow them to pay market rate rent, you’ll have to raise taxes enough more that some people just managing to pay market rate rent now will no longer be able to pay it and either need subsidies themselves or leave the city.

      There is simply no free lunch on this. I’m afraid that if teachers quit and move elsewhere, the market will force some increase in their pay but only enough to hire the numbers needed–not enough to crate the sort of applicant surplus we have with firefighters and cops (who, counting benefits, are clearly overpaid).

      Meanwhile, teachers may have to either have roommates or commute from more affordable suburbs like a lot of people do.

      1. FWIW, see my comment below, quite a big number of teachers already commute from the suburbs to work here, and have been doing it since time immemorial in SF.

  2. Further, the SFUSD is setting the salaries of teachers. If they truly valued teachers, they’d have less people at the top making the money they are making. The priority of the SFUSD is not teachers and students but to enrich those bureaucrats pushing paper and agendas on Fell/Van Ness & Gough Streets. Do they really need that many administrators for 50k students?

  3. I hesitate to even engage with 4th Gen, but here we go:

    Just to be clear, you believe that a father or mother of a family of 4, let’s say, who has been a teacher for 20 years should need to get a roommate? Sorry but I think that a high quality teacher ought to be able to support a modest family (2 spouses and a couple of kids) on a teacher’s salary and live somewhere in the Bay Area within a reasonable commuting distance to his/her job. I am not suggesting, if you read my comments carefully, that teachers are “owed” anything other than a salary reflective of the importance of their work to the community. Wait, perhaps I have this wrong, maybe you just don’t think that teachers are important. That would be a different discussion.

    Next: I have no idea how many administrators it takes to effectively run a school district serving 50,000 students. Nor do I know how many there are in SF, nor do I know how much they earn, but it seems you do. Could you enlighten all of us pls?

    1. Easy to look at some of the admins making $200k, $300k, $400k, $500k & above there are public databases of this information on SFGate.

      Also, if a teacher has been here 20 years and hasn’t bought a house here in SF, whose problem is it? Not ours. Most teachers have bought homes, and quite a number of people who work for SFUSD live outside of SF, right now! Amazing! And have lived outside of SF for decades. Also a good number of them send their kids to private schools, especially if they live in SF.

    2. It’s about economics, not what anybody believes. San Francisco cannot print money. If it spends more on teachers or any group of employees, it has to raise that money from the citizenry. I am opposed to large numbers of city employees making substantially more than many of the people taxed to pay for them as long as it isn’t completely unavoidable (meaning we need the public employees and can’t hire them at lower pay).

      Believe it or not, many people living in San Francisco did not just move here and buy a condo and rent an apartment at current price levels which they couldn’t afford. But when school taxes or sales taxes go up, they have to find room in their budgets to pay them and still afford their mortgage or rent.

    3. Why do teachers deserve to live in SF vs other professions. My mom taught for 35 years and never complained about her salary. We also lived in a small house on the poorer side of town with longer commute. Never complained. What’s with entitlement mentality these days. ? Teachers can live in SF with roommates or live in San Leandro without. What’s the big deal?

  4. All this bantering and still not one of you can answer the question of how many teachers in SF can currently afford to buy a market-rate condo.

    @4th gen: so most SF teachers have bought homes? I’d love to see you come up with statistics on this!

    1. SFUSD salary for fully credentialed teachers with a BA are in the $49-55k range for 1-10 years of service. There are pay bumps for 30 and 60 of grad credit hours, but even then with 10 years of service is less than $70k. Their Collective Bargaining Agreements and Salary Schedules are online. Don’t mention anything about stock options.

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