399 5th Street Site

As we first reported last year, the development team behind the proposed redevelopment of the All Stars Donuts shop site at 5th and Harrison had shifted gears and drafted plans for a hotel, rather than housing, to rise upon the 399 5th Street parcel.

The plans for the eight-story, 196-room hotel have since been refined by Stanton Architecture, a redesign which included eliminating the hotel’s proposed basement garage for 14 cars and moving the hotel’s entrance on Clara.

In addition, the formal application to move forward with the project has just been submitted to Planning.

But once again, while the site is currently only zoned for building up to 55-feet in height, the project team is counting on the passage of San Francisco’s pending Central SoMa Plan which is slated to upzone the corner for development up to 85 feet.

18 thoughts on “Proposed 5th Street Hotel and Fewer Donuts Closer to Reality”
  1. The inevitable result of the Supervisors overreaching on % of Below-Market-Units required in housing projects. They don’t seem to understand that 25% of 0 units = 0.

  2. Terminally boring and mundane. As was the case with the previous item, the earlier version is superior to the “refined one.

      1. Does anyone have the city contact for this project? If we flood them with emails of complaint, perhaps they’ll stop destroying decent designs…

  3. These hotel proposals are popping up all over Soma dependent upon the passage of the Central Soma Plan. Too bad the plan doesn’t impose any aesthetic benchmarks for these projects. Really looks like a Hampton Inn off the freeway in a mid-sized midwest city!

    1. Do you really want esthetics determined by bureaucrats? Bad as some proposals may be, I’d rather have each one designed by a separate team and built according to their esthetic rather than have the same committee or group of people, with no special talent, passing on every design in the city. Too much of that goes on now.

      1. I so much agree. We are the center of new ideas and technology for the world and yet we build the worse buildings because too many people are involved and making judgements on design that have no place making such judgements, some are within the city and some in the general public. We end up with crap in most cases!

      2. Unfortunately, we seem to have a de facto aesthetic review being done by the planning department — and they are doing a very poor job at it. So maybe a different approach (even a different committee) would be better.

  4. Indeed the Central SOMA plan is pretty much a giveaway to developers with nothing asked in return. In terms of aesthetics, sidewalk engagement and integration of the whole area. Do hotels have to contribute to the affordable housing fund? If not, maybe that is why there seems to be a lot of hotel proposals lately.

    The Central SOMA plan is fatally flawed because of its jobs/housing imbalance and, in its present form, won’t survive public scrutiny and pushback without major changes.

    To be fair, it’s not just the Central SOMA that suffers from a dearth of architectural aesthetics – though the Soviet style housing block proposed for 6th. are perhaps – or would be if built – the perfect example of the architectural banality which has swept the City during the recent boom. Future generation will ask what were they thinking when they approved these buildings.

    1. There are a lot of hotel proposals lately because SF is one of the hottest hotel markets in the country, partly due to a shortage of rooms which become even more acute when Moscone fully reopens.

  5. Eliminating the garage at this location is probably a mistake from a commercial perspective. This isn’t tourist central. I suspect at least some guests at a place ike this, in this location would arrive by car. But I realize eliminating the garage is probably a sop to the Planning Dept.

  6. I know a few blocks in Eastern Europe that just look like this. Did the lead architect study in Karl-Marx-Stadt or Bratislava?

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