Ambitious Plans for Prominent Chunk of Telegraph Hill Revealed
December 7, 2018
With the list price for the 120-foot-wide chunk of Telegraph Hill’s hillside which fronts Sansome Street, below the homes at the end of Alta Street above, having been reduced to $998,000 earlier this year, the sale of the 1235 Sansome Street site (which is technically three parcels and was once part of the quarry from which stone for San Francisco’s City Hall was harvested) is now pending.
And as newly envisioned and rendered by EE Weiss Architects below, an eleven-story building could rise up to 110 feet in height on site as measured from Sansome Street but technically below the 84-foot height limit for the site based on its slope.
In addition to stabilizing the slope, the ambitious 22,000-squre-foot development would yield seven rental units with a total of 84 bedroom suites, each with a private bath and shared kitchens/living rooms; a 1,150-square-foot common area on the sixth floor; 2,850 square feet of commercial space; a storage room for 40 bikes; and a rooftop deck.
And yes, the project sits within the boundaries of the Waterfront Historic District and is under the purview of the Telegraph Hill Neighborhood Association. We’ll keep you posted and plugged-in.
Comments from Plugged-In Readers
Comments are closed.
Oh boy. THD is going to have a field day with this one. Early bets on scary nicknames? The Telegraph Terror? Can we file this one under never gonna happen?
“would yield seven rental units with a total of
10384 bedroom suites”Wait, so how many total units? And what’s the breakdown of 1s vs 2s, vs 3s?
As drafted, it’s technically seven units with either 11 or 12 bedroom suites per unit.
Don’t get it – is that because of the property unit-count limits? Or are these envisioned as group housing?
So, basically, an Airbnb hotel?
Or upscale coder cabins. But more likely just value maximizing so the City will buy it for open space at a higher price.
Or perhaps Dorm living for Lower-paid professionals. Even if it actually gets built, they’re not going to get away with purpose-built short-term rentals at this location.
That is just plain butt ugly.
Calling it butt ugly is a disservice to all the nice butts out there…
Indeed. What on Earth happened to architecture.
Peskin is already very upset
He’s having a few cocktails in preparation for making a proclamation later tonight!
This looks like an awesome project!!
pepper the slope with 100 sq ft sister houses a la steep ravine meets teddy cruz – a permit free disruption that restores telegraph hill circa 1890 “home of the hoodlums”
Now THAT’s a 13K cubic yard excavation!
I rather like it as a Man vs. Nature contest…tho I’m not sure which one I’ll put my money on.
great to see more housing being proposed on TH!
Are the houses above gonna sink or tilt after the new construction? Kinda like Millenium Tower?
Par for the course – pave/cement over every sliver of open space remaining in the city. No way this gets built. It will be tied up forever in litigation. Plus it looks awful. Replacing a dramatic cliff/swath of green in the center of the city with group housing – only in SF! That said, having lowered the price for the lot to 998K, why didn’t the deep pocket folks on Telegraph Hill via the THDA raise the money to outright purchase the parcel and keep in permanent open space? They will spend as much and more in legal fees litigating this.
It is fair to say that nobody uses that piece of open space. I see your point about the ‘dramatic cliff’. Just one person’s opinion I don’t find the current conditions very attractive. It is certainly not natural being a quarry scar and not a natural cliff. I’d rather look at an attractive building than that scrappy piece of rock. Hopefully the developer can come up with something more attractive than that ugly McPaint mockup.
Ha! The City should just spare us all the pain and buy this piece of cliff. $1m seems like a reasonable price.
If it gets entitled for this, it’s going to be much more than $1 million. But then again, isn’t that the point?
Does anyone else’s face hurt just looking at this?
I have mentioned this before, but these parcels went unbid at a delinquent property tax auction.
This is a sham to try to get someone to buy the hillside, either in earnest or to “save the neighborhood.”
wow, that’s gonna be one helluva retaining wall.
my money says it never gets built.
where are the neighborhood coyotes supposed to live?
The site in 1910.
Just to set the record straight, City Hall is clad in Sierra granite, not San Francisco serpentine.
I agree with others, this is clearly a hostage taking. Someone will pay to make sure that this never happens. Or, if it does happen, residents of Telegraph Hill can do what their ancestors did and crush it with boulders.
While I frankly would LOVE to see a tower like this go up, as this is not open space anybody is using remotely and it even seems unlikely this would block views, the entirely unrealistic unit count (11 suites in each unit) and the general market timing seems like a hostage situation to try to get out with a good price by dangling a “if you buy it this won’t get built” carrot in the air to the THD.
With that being said, what I think is somewhat ironic is that in the desperate attempt to thwart anything new, whether housing or restaurants, near their properties, one has to wonder if this will hurt TH rather than help it. I can’t really imagine that this location with absolutely nothing going on near it will continue to competitively court the 25-45 wealthier set in the future, as that demographic increasingly cares more about what is around the house than the house itself. If projects over the years that have been successfully thwarted by THD had been approved (say, 555 Washington, 8 Washington, the Pier 29 renovation, various hotel projects that may still go forward, etc) that would have brought new activity and retail/restaurants to the area, as well as easing up on the restaurant caps in North Beach and Jackson Square. Without any of that, it seems like the “happening” area of the FiDi will inevitably shift south of Market once all the Transbay buildings are finished with full with retail (heard Related had a LOI out for every single spot in The Avery paseo months ago), Transbay is fixed and full of retail, the new high end hotels get built up with their rooftop bars (Virgin, 555 Howard, etc). Incredible views aside, TH has nothing going for it right now in terms of lifestyle and it’s certainly not as if newer towers going up, or traditional locations in Pac Heights, are lacking in views.
We’ve already seen that buyers who would have formerly sprung for Pac Heights are now snapping up stuff on Liberty Hill/Mission. IMO TH seems even more vulnerable to this trend because at least with Pac Heights there is plenty of stuff opening and going on on Chestnut. Cannot name a single significant opening in Jackson Square or North Beach.
I’m just not sure what would make a younger but still wealthy buyer favor TH over Transbay, the Mission, the Marina, etc at this point. And I’m not sure we’ll see the heavy focus on nearby lifestyle amenities abate as that generation of wealth gets older.
Will be interesting to watch, for sure.
I’ll add my hat to the “this is a scam” and “this will never get built” crowd based on the building code that requires all bedrooms to have a window to the outside. So they’ll have to excavate the area surrounding the building and build an 8 story retaining wall on three sides, all to end up with bedroom windows with views that look like solitary confinement at a prison. Although I’m sure it’s structurally feasible to do so, the costs will be far more than anyone is going to pay for a prison view.
After watching the extortionists work a tax sale at Presideo Terrace, I have to think something similar is being attempted here.
It is an ugly design although a clever use of vertical space; however, similarly built construction has had nothing but trouble with water seeping through the rock and the tendency of the rocky hill to forever want to collapse. Telegraph Hill has been undermined too often to make a project like this safe and doable
So what about the rest of the hill? If they’re going to put this here, they may as well put similar buildings along the rest of the hillside on Sansome.
I hope they build it and give the Telegraph Hill Neighborhood Association – AKA the alt-right of the left – hell. There is no limit to the number of children THNA would throw into cages if it meant protecting their view.
You think that because people fight having greedy developers try to shove ugly buildings such as this in every available lot, tearing down historic buildings to do so, and blocking peoples well fought for views, that this somehow makes them on par with Hitler?
Oh, you’re one of those people who claims that these overpriced condos are somehow going to help the homeless. Yes I’m sure the people living in tents on Fern Alley are just sitting there with a $300K down payment next to their fentanyl pipe in their pockets waiting for the right overpriced condo to come along.
While briefly in contract, for the fourth time over the past four years, the listing for the parcel at 1235 Sansome Street is once again active with a list price of $998,000.
UPDATE: Sale of Telegraph Hill Hillside and (Even) Bigger Plans Pending, Again