75 Arkansas Street Site

As we reported in July:

Plans to levels the one-story warehouse building on the northeast corner of Arkansas and 17th Streets and develop a four-story dorm for students enrolled at the California College of the Arts on the Lower Potrero Hill site are closer to reality, with San Francisco’s Planning Department having just granted the project an Eastern Neighborhoods Plan-based exemption from having to complete a lengthy environmental review.

The proposed building, which is being designed by Leddy Maytum Stacy (LMS) Architects, would rise up to 48-feet in height at 75 Arkansas Street. And while technically only 30 units of housing across the top three floors, each multi-room unit includes a small living/dining room and kitchenette and the 30 units would be outfitted with a total of 228 beds.

The ground floor of the building includes 7,400 square feet of retail space on the corner, a large multi-purpose room for the students, and a storage room for 80 bikes.

And if approved by San Francisco’s Planning Commission, the project will take an estimated 14 months to complete from the time it breaks ground, the building permits for which have already been requested and triaged.

The project has since been rendered and the public hearing for 75 Arkansas has been scheduled for next week, so far without any official opposition and the support of Save the Hill and Friends of Jackson Park.

75 Arkansas Rendering

19 thoughts on “Potrero Hill Dorm Development Rendered and Slated for Review”
  1. This is exciting, but the surrounding area here has become almost unbearable because of utter neglect of the block bounded by 16th and 8th, Wisconsin and Carolina to the north. The homeless encampments and bike chop shops have reached a new level and it’s hard to watch.

    1. They’ll have to kick out the softball-playing punks who occupy the park now and prevent neighborhood residents from enjoying it.

    2. Gee, yes, those California College of Art students will be such punks. Lemon Obrien is just ignorant, sadly like many people who post here spouting off about things they don’t know anything about.

  2. 30 units and 228 beds total? That averages to 7 plus folks per unit. Bit crowded even with a living/dining room and kitchenette in each unit. Are we talking bunk beds?

    1. Part of solving the housing issue is recognizing that different kinds of people have different needs. If more millennials had convenient urban housing available they wouldn’t be going out into the residential neighborhoods and renting single family homes to split with their friends.

    1. Yes, the Academy of Art should build more housing. But, what is possible is not always feasible. First, typically you want student housing to be actually near where classes are offered, not half-way across town. Second, ANY new proposed development in SF generally gets fought tooth-and-nail by “neighborhood activists” (even when there is not much of a surrounding neighborhood). I am not a fan of AAU skirting zoning laws (and I support having them punished for doing so), but perhaps if the city made it easier to build housing in general, and student housing in particular, there would be less incentive for them to try to break the rules. When the system is broke, it simply encourages people to game the system.

      It is also worth mentioning that all of the residential buildings AAU occupies, even the “SROs” would rent for astronomical rents, so contrary to what some people think, they would not provide “affordable housing” (not unless the city wants to use taxpayer dollars to buy them for market rate and then convert them at its own expense into subsidized city-owned housing). Instead, the buildings would simply get sold at market-rate to investors who would rent them out at very high rents.

      All that said, it is good to see something being down to address the real need for more students housing, and I hope this new dorm gets built and doesn’t get shot down by “activists.”

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