Mayor London Breed’s Housing for All plan, announced earlier this year, has a goal of building 82,000 new homes over the next eight years, with roughly 60 percent, or 46,000, slated to be “affordable.” A modest contribution to reaching this quite ambitious objective is a planned affordable housing complex to be developed at 249 Pennsylvania Avenue by Tenderloin Neighborhood Development Corporation (TNDC) and Young Community Developers (YCD).
“While Potrero Hill and Dogpatch have seen significant residential development under the Eastern Neighborhoods Plan, little of it has been affordable,” said Potrero Boosters President J.R. Eppler. “We look forward to working with the City and developers to deliver affordable housing at 249 Pennsylvania, a site that has been vacant for several years and become a blight to its neighbors.”
The property, which sits between 999 Mariposa Street – the former location of Center Hardware – and Pennsylvania Street Gardens has suffered from illegal dumping and encampments for the unhoused, along with fires, theft, drug use, human waste, and used needles. With minimal municipal support, volunteers have struggled to maintain some level of civility in the area.
This isn’t the first-time neighbors have heard about plans for housing at the property. In 2016, then-owners William Spencer and his son, Zach, announced that they were going to develop 999 Mariposa Street, along with adjacent parcels 249 Pennsylvania and a surface parking lot, into a mixed-use project. The family created an LLC in 2017, Czs Property Management, and contracted with architecture design firm D-Scheme Studio to create renderings. In 2022 that relationship was terminated. The property has been neglected ever since. Czs didn’t respond to multiple requests for an interview.
The new housing project will consist of roughly 100 units. According to TNDC senior project manager Alberto Benejam, planning is in the early stages, with a community engagement effort to be launched over the next few months to help shape 249 Pennsylvania Avenue’s characteristics. Designers and outreach consultants will be retained to ensure that the project is “anchored in an understanding of the neighborhood,” Benejam said. “We think this site would make an excellent location for family housing, given the robust amenities in Potrero Hill and the adjacent communities.”
At least half the units will be two- and three-bedrooms, priced to be affordable to households making between 30 percent to 80 percent of the area median income, approximately $38,900 to $103,750 a year for a three-person household. All units will be rentals.
“Affordable housing requires long predevelopment periods, so we don’t anticipate construction beginning for a few years,” Benejam added. “We’ll refine all these details further as the design and financing strategy progress.”
The Hill site is one of five slated to be developed as affordable housing. The others are at 1234 Great Highway, developed by TNDC and Self-Help for the Elderly; 650 Divisadero Street, developed by Jonathan Rose Company and YCD; 250 Laguna Honda Boulevard, developed by Mission Housing Development Corporation; and 3300 Mission Street, developed by Bernal Heights Neighborhood Center, Tabernacle Community Development Corporation, and Mitchelville Real Estate Group.
The site will benefit from state and local laws aimed at streamlining affordable housing approval and construction, including Senate Bill 35, which requires local entities to simplify endorsement of certain housing projects, as well as Housing for All reforms, such as reducing procedural requirements that impede housing production.
“We have a lot more work to do to remove barriers to getting housing built faster and advancing more affordable housing, but this is a great step and I want to thank the Mayor’s Office of Housing and Community Development for their work to advance projects like these,” Breed said in a press release.
Danny Pham 
Jessica Zimmer 
Chaitanya Tondepu