With building permits for the approved six-story, 186-unit development to rise on the Divisadero Touchless Carwash site next door having been requested and triaged, the 12,000-square-foot ARCO station site on the southeast corner of Divisadero and Fell is now on the market with a $8.75 million price tag.
But as we wrote with respect to the plans for the Standard station site on Van Ness, don’t get too excited unless you’re a fan of the station.
For while the 1175 Fell Street site is zoned for development up to 65-feet in height, the existing station is “in the top 10% of performers in the ARCO network.” And the sale of the site is being structured with a new 15-year lease for the station to be signed at closing and five 5-year options to extend.
Many Uber drivers have told me that’s the preferred station in the city: cheap, central and with great access. The sales volume must jump off the page.
I never had any real hopes for infill there. I’m hoping the 76 across the street gets housing instead. It’s a bigger lot, and they might be able to take the Ted and Al’s Towing building with them. That’s a former horse and carriage fire station that’s probably a historic resource though. A “For Sale” sign was briefly on the building last year but it may have been a brief cat and mouse game with Ted and Al’s.
Regardless of the delay in development here, the future of Divisadero is extremely bright. Between the gentrification of retail on the corridor (it boomed big time between 2013-2017), the central location, the parks (four within 5-6 blocks), the recent upzoning, and the *lack* of transport (hear me out), the economic pulls will be too great to resist building on these industrial lots that no longer fit the neighborhood. The lack of transport comment means that with no underground MUNI or BART it attracts fewer homeless or out of towners. It’s an ideal locals area.
400 Divis and 650 Divis will likely happen as late stage projects during this boom. The Lofrano garage on Fulton will probably happen next boom. Precision Auto Repair (next door to 4505 Meats), Sung’s Automotive (Divis and Golden Gate), Kelly Moore Paints (Divis and Oak) along with a handful of single story commercial buildings (Ng’s Cleaners and Mangrove Kitchen side by side come to mind) are also obvious marks.
If those projects happen, and they can find a way to widen the sidewalks and reduce Divis to one lane of traffic, it will surpass Hayes Valley in desireability.
And yes, I’m a homer. 🙂
Agree with most of what you said, and especially the bit about widening sidewalks and reducing traffic. Fell, Oak, and Divis are such car sewers with tons of noise, it makes walking (or biking) along the commercial areas really unpleasant.
Agreed. Hayes Valley does alright with Fell/Oak/Gough/Franklin all running through it, because it has picture perfect Hayes St as the centerpiece. Divis needs the same. Reducing Divis down to one lane and using that newfound ~8 feet for sidewalk would be a wonderful change. Masonic and Webster are nearby enough as north/south arteries. Scott is a respectable bike street. Time to put Divis commerce / pedestrian life front and center.
Divisadero is critical to north-south traffic that I think it should stay the way it is. If you wanted more space or a reduction in traffic, I would prefer closing some of the cross streets like Grove (possibly Fulton and McAllister) and making them into open spaces a la the Octavia area in Hayes Valley.
Exactly. Cars have to go *somewhere* – even trendoid electric self-driving cars. And Divisadero is hardly a traffic-choked artery that’s impossible to cross – nor are Fell and Oak that bad for peds either – and I say that as someone who regularly walks along and across, and bikes along and across, all three.
But hasn’t it been proven that cars don’t have to go back? When the 3 lane per direction of Embarcadero freeway got disabled and closed down, the world didn’t end. Where did the cars go?
Today, I’m sure Google Maps will quickly find you a better route that might be a minute longer by moving some cars to Fillmore/Webster, Masonic or maybe Franklin/Gough.
How do you plan on closing the cross streets?
I’m not sure you know what an unpleasant pedestrian experience is … Divis is 2 lanes in each direction, and given the light timing it is by no means a thruway of speeding cars. North/south traffic has to go somewhere; if you narrow Divis to one lane each way, where do you propose to handle the demand? (Divis is basically the only N/S arterial between Park Presidio and Gough/Franklin/Van Ness.)
The concept of “reduced demand” applies here. Traffic can go to Masonic, Webster, or a variety of other N/S streets.
Also, Divis isn’t even that good of an artery as is, as the left lane get stopped by people trying to turn left, and the right lane gets stopped by cars being stopped by pedestrians crossing.
Making Divis one lane only, but preventing left turns is would be a win for pedestrians and probably wouldn’t hurt traffic a whole lot.
If you eliminate left turns, then all the people who would’ve turned left now do three rights – substituting 5 block-lengths trips in place of one, and adding traffic to Scott. And by your own statement peds crossing side streets impede right-turning cars, of which there would be ~2x if left turns are eliminated. So now your one-lane Divis is a parking lot as cars try to turn right.
As for going to Masonic – so, it’s OK for that to be a 4-lane fast arterial, but not Divis?
Not true. There can still be protected left turns at Oak and Fell. Places like Park Presidio and Geary have done this no problem (can’t turn left).
Regarding Masonic, it’s a recently re-designed street meant to be an arterial. It probably has 20% of the pedestrian traffic of Divis because there is no commerce on it.
If they can eliminate All left turns, the one lane of traffic idea (with good alcoves for muni bus stops) could work. It’s the jockeying around the left turners and the buses that bottlenecks the traffic on Divisadero.
Would have to eliminate all ride share pick ups and drop offs, and deliveries, which constantly block the right lanes. Not going to happen.
What happens on Hayes Street, Chestnut or Union, all three of which are single lane commercial strips? No reason why Divis can’t be the same.
An underrated point I think. Ride shares can be restricted to pickup/dropoff on cross streets (like they did with parts of Valencia). Get rid of the street parking and convert most of it to widened sidewalks with occasional pullouts for delivery trucks and buses. Plus eliminate almost all of the left turns. If all of that happened, you might not even need to reduce the number of lanes, although I wouldn’t personally be opposed to that either. Even if they just did this between Haight and Turk, that’d be a huge improvement.
Since the virus has not gone away, the economy is horribly over-indebted, and we have seen the biggest crash in retail in a century, how can you post such a panglossian take on ANY San Francisco neighborhood, even on a real estate site which, while balanced, has an inherent bias towards optimism? Batten down the hatches is the only realistic approach.
“Batten down the hatches” doesn’t seem like a plan or approach so much as it does a vague generality.
I assume we have reached or will soon reach the point where Marijuana Dispensaries outnumber gas stations in San Francisco.
Unless Medical Gas Huffing become a Thing….