For the second time since 2012, the verdant Russian Hill parcel on the northwest corner of Broadway and Taylor, big plans for which have been drawn, has been taken back by the bank.
As we outlined earlier this week:
Having sat vacant since the former house which had occupied the prime Russian Hill parcel on the northwest corner of Broadway and Taylor was demolished back in 1910, big plans to redevelop the oversized 1000 Broadway site were pitched back in 2006.
In 2012, the hedge fund which had provided a $15 million loan to help finance the proposed “Wysteria Residences on Russian Hill” project foreclosed on the property without the project having ever broken ground.
And three years ago, the refined, but yet to be approved, plans for two single-family homes and a two-unit building to rise up to four stories in height across the site and yield 17,000 square feet of living space over a shared 10-car garage were submitted to the city for review along with a request for building permits.
The parcel/project was recapitalized in November of 2017 by way of a new $13,335,000 loan.
And as a plugged-in tipster notes, the owners of the verdant corner parcel are now facing foreclosure anew, with $14,979,608 past due on the loan (including fees, unpaid interest and principal) and an auction slated for this Thursday, September 5, on the steps of City Hall.
The opening bid for the parcel was subsequently set at $10.8 million. And with no bidders, the parcel at 1000 Broadway has been foreclosed upon anew and taken back by the bank.
I’m sure the city threw up so many roadblocks and churn time for this project that it finally fizzled. And they wonder why we have a housing crisis.
Failure to provide a handful of multi-million dollar units does not affect the housing crisis. Anybody who would have lived here will have other options and can afford whatever it costs.
On the surface, it seems there might be some feasibility issues with land that the developer is into at a cost of >$5 million per unit. Look at the surrounding buildings. It’s nice, but not Billionaire’s Row.
The same systemic failure hurts every project. This is exemplary, not instrumental.
only in SF, don’t build and let scarcity make housing expensive across the board; then reject any proposed project because it’s so expensive that it doesn’t help anyone.
honestly, i’d go 3 floors underground and as high as the City would let me build and turn the parcel into a commercial parking structure and put big-ass socially conscious murals on the exterior walls, in the style/taste of the surrounding neighborhood.
– that neighborhood is dying for parking (and can afford to pay for it)
– they could block off that one side of street parking thus effectively widening the street
– better serves the existing population instead of just adding 2 houses.
The parcel is zoned RH-2: Residential, so you’d be required to apply for a Conditional Use Authorization (CUA) in order to open your proposed parking structure.
Last time I checked, Proposition “A” or the Transit Reform, Parking Regulation and Emissions Reduction Charter Amendment from back in 2007 implicitly limited the number of privately owned parking garages, to wit:
So unless some parking garage elsewhere in The City was being torn down (to build housing, perhaps), your CUA application would be highly unlikely to be approved. Your odds of getting a supermajority vote from the Board of Supervisors to build a garage here I’d say would be low, but I’m sure that playing those odds is a large part of what makes being in the real estate “game” so exciting for developers who arrive here from elsewhere to make their fortune.
Union Square Garage was built during WWII with the rationalization that it could serve as a bomb shelter; maybe ‘MOCH’ could build his/her garage under the pretense of it being a “navigation center”…repurposing permitted when none of the homeless are found willing to trek up to (near) the top of Russian Hill.
so make it a City owned garage. and i’m a SF native BTW.
i think if they gave a vote to everyone within 2 blocks of there, it’d be like 95%+ for building it. even the local building owners would like it because it would increase their building’s desirability and thus demand and thus rents (and for the City via property tax values).
the City could build it and sub out the entire management of it, if there’s some conflict about SF gov owned+run commercial structures, but i’d be surprized if SF gov wasn’t already a commercial LL, besides public housing, which broadly could be interpreted as a “precedent”.
everyone here can relate to having to drive around the block for 20 minutes looking for a spot. this could be framed as corrective urban planning.
SF changes whatever it wants, whenever it wants, and a few rich NIMBYs, whose dinner party guests will use the garage too, should put their weight into getting neighborhood improvement projects done instead of spending their time researching codes to prevent anything from happening.
that lot is so overgrown and neglected that it has the #1 and #2 biggest trees on the block and one side of the property is collapsing onto the sidewalk below. but that’s better than getting 500 cars off the street and cleaning up a historic eyesore.
As someone who lives right across the street from that corner. I would hate to have a big parking garage there. It would be ugly and not at all fitting of the neighborhood aesthetic. I do street parking and can always find a spot even if it’s a block or 2 away.
If you live in 1001-5 Broadway, your building is twice as dense as what zoning allows now: 3 units on 1700 sqft of land, versus 4 units on this 5400 sqft parcel. Classic example of zoning getting changed over time… in the wrong direction.
With the 12 bus stop a block away, and yes that block is flat, this would be a perfect location for some dense transit-oriented development. Go just a little taller, get 30 units in there, and the prices, while high, would be much less stratospheric than the $5+ million mansions that will result from the status quo… with 4 units required to be set aside as affordable.
It isn’t a foregone conclusion that anything built here will be a couple of mansions for the uber-rich. It’s the zoning that makes it so.
what’s the difference if cars are efficiently, quietly coming and going versus them just driving around the block endlessly? you already have the parking “hunter” traffic. in theory, that will be reduced.
and anywhere you need to park 2 blocks from where you live, needs a garage nearby. maybe my time is worth more than yours but i’d rather pay $10/day and have that 20min of my life back.
5+days/week x 20min is like 8-10 hours/month. over a year that’s 96-120 hours of your life looking for parking, wear/tear on your car, burning gas and occasional parking tickets. that’s 2.5 – 3 working weeks (40hrs) annually. maybe you should uber.
is owning a car but not paying for parking really that important for you? it’s like clipping coupons. not actually worth the time spent.
Your third ‘graph brings up an excellent idea for a revenue generator for The City and a way to disreward the Travis Kalanicks in this town.
Someone with a technical background and an entrepreneurial bent should should come up with some way of tracking Uber/Lyft drivers (or just accessing the data that those companies are already collecting in near-real time after they are regulatorily forced to make it available), and when they pull into a parking spot on a public street while they await their next fare, a meter should start ticking —adding up by the minute for the time they spend taking a parking spot away from someone else who is not engaged in the business of “ride sharing”.
At the end of each month, the “ride sharing platforms” would get a bill for the amount to deduct from their gross revenue on a per driver enumerated basis. The resulting software system could be sold to The City or operated as a contracted service with The City as a customer, in either case it would pay for itself in short order by monetizing the amount of time that the “ride sharing platforms” are currently utilizing the public parking right-of-way without paying for it. All the wanna be Mark Zuckerbergs out there, you’re welcome to this business idea, you don’t have to cut me in as an equity partner.
This would force the ride sharing “platforms” to internalize more of the cost of their operations that they are currently getting away with shunting on to residents and others not engaged in commercial activity. Because the “ride sharing platforms” employ “independent contractors” who are not licensed, they are not paying the taxes that support road maintenance and repair like other commercial vehicle operators.
I know I will get clobbered for bringing this up, but the property in question is part of the National Register-listed Russian Hill Historic District. So, no parking garage. Sorry! This also means that any project on the block would need to get a Certificate of Appropriateness from the Historic Preservation Commission.
UPDATE: Corner of (Broken) Dreams Back on the Market