The San Francisco Planning Commission meets each Thursday at noon. While a typical week can cover too many topics and projects to cover each with an individual article, I want to bring a broader range of planning-related issues to your attention via these commission summaries. If something piques your interest, show up, speak up, and help the commission make the right decisions for the future of San Francisco.
A few interesting items are being continued to future commission hearings.
2588 Mission Street, a 10-story, 181-unit project in the Mission district, will be revisited on February 6th. Getting anything approved in the Mission district is always a journey, so I will revisit this in February.
A proposal to allow the condominium conversion of ADUs is also being pushed into February. This will be interesting to track, and I think the devil will be in the details on whether we see ADUs converted to for sale in the future. Everybody loves a good ADU story, so I will dig deeper when this comes back next month.
The consent calendar has, hopefully, some low-hanging fruit for the commission. Allowing a climbing gym to occupy some vacant retail space and bringing a new salad option to the inner sunset.
Finally, we make it to the regular calendar, where the action begins.
The commission is reviewing the final office conversion and demolition inventory per the requirements of Proposition C, passed in 2024. Proposition C does a few good things, like exempting residential conversions from the real estate transfer tax, allowing existing office space that is demolished for new office projects to be credited towards any required office allocation, and pertinent to this commission meeting, creating an office conversion and demolition credit program, wherein conversions and demolition of General Office Space of 10,000 square feet or more occurring on or after January 1, 1986, may be added back to the program.
The final inventory report identifies 2,322,387 square feet of converted or demolished office space, as defined by Proposition C. Now, we need some developers to propose some new office development to take advantage of this additional allocation.
Two additional, smaller-scale projects will also come before the commission, both looking to add density by demolishing existing improvements. Adding small-scale density throughout the city is a trend I hope to see at weekly commission hearings.
As mentioned above, some items are worth tracking and following up on, so stay tuned for more information in the weeks ahead.
