1880 Mission starts construction starts tomorrow. It will be a 6-story “market rate” (expensive-as-fuck) residential building:
The $60 million, 230,000-square-foot mixed-use project will provide much-needed workforce housing: 202 residences –a mix of studios; one-, two- and three-bedroom homes; and, penthouse lofts. Also included in the six stories of wood over concrete building is 7,502 sq. ft. of street-level retail space and 155 below groundparking spaces, as well as amenities such as two interior landscaped courtyards, community garden, multimedia fitness facility, bike workroom and secured bike parking or each unit.
The proximity to the Armory will be a plus for you kinky types. Maybe you’ll even get a window-level view!
The groundbreaking is tomorrow at 2pm, in case you want to protest the fact that more valuable parking spots are being taken away from our fair city.
Update: Mr. Eric Sir pointed out that the building rendering is available online and is “ugly as shit”, an opinion which I will further demonstrate by sloppily scaling up the microscopic source image here:
 residential building: The $60 million, 230,000-square-foot mixed-use project will provide much-needed workforce housing: 202 residences –a mix of studios; one-, two- and three-bedroom homes; and, penthouse lofts. Also included in the six stories of wood over concrete building is 7,502 sq. […]</p>
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Sweet. High density housing: good. Urban-infill housing: good. If there are no affordable units: bad. People riding their bike to work: great! Walking into the Mission to support local businesses: great! Housing that keeps families in SF: really great! Loss of parking: maybe an ok tradeoff.
Not only will there be “affordable units”, the percentage was raised to 20% from the standard 12% in order to get the project approved, according to the socketsite link that Mr. Eric Sir dropped.
I’m fine with the aesthetic. The same company did the building catty-corner from it across Mission and it looks OK. Obviously it’s not amazing, but I think there’s only so much you can do with wood-over-concrete construction and fiscally that’s probably the only building choice that makes the #’s work.
Overall I’m just happy that there are functional buildings popping up in this area to replace the shells and wrecks that were there before them.
20% is better than 12%. More goodness. In many ways we should feel lucky to have it.
It might sound like infill, but the reality is that you won’t be getting families moving in from Pleasanton, Danville, and other sprawl areas. It will be occupied by people moving to SF from places like NY, Chicago, or anywhere in the Midwest. Either that, or a pied-a-terre for some wealthy person with a primary residence in some sprawl area. That’s not infill, that’s just more people.
I don’t think you know what infill is.
Agreed
They already demolished the building where the the new units are going to be.
What is it going to look like? Is it going to be another one of those architectural abortions like they’ve been slapping up on Valencia?
Of course! This page includes a (small) rendering of the ugly-as-shit condos:
http://www.socketsite.com/archives/2010/06/1880_mission_gardens_now_slated_for_spring_2011_bloom.html
Oh christ that’s ugly.
Really? That’s your standard for “ugly-as-shit”? Makes a body wonder how you managed to not rip your eyeballs out of their sockets when you had to look at the beat-up, run-down, squatted-in, everlastingly-tagged, useless pile-of-crap printing plant that used to be there!
If you’d care to tone-down the rhetoric, though, I’ll settle for “bland-as-Los Angeles”. I’ve seen much worse dumps here, and some of them were even Edwardian cracker-boxes.
I actually really like the Roesch building. I mean, it was neglected and derelict, sure, but if it were fixed up it would be lovely.
However, I understand and accept that there isn’t much call for a printing plant like that these days, or, in fact, for much other light industry in this part of this city. So it’s reasonable for it to be recorded and replaced… I just wish that it were going to be replaced by something less ugly than what they are apparently GOING to be putting there.
Oh I mean no question that the building that used to be there was an eyesore, but that doesn’t mean we need to replace one eyesore with another.
I just don’t see why the folks building condos feel the need to make the entire city look like Mission Bay.
Seconded.
I don’t know why, either, but I do know that the alternative is worse: urban blight. I’ve lived in Detroit once already; I don’t need to live there again.
I do not accept that those are the only two options.
Due to the paucity of counter-examples, for practical discussion, those are the only two options. Virtually all rentals, whether in apartments or single-family homes, are compromises with ugliness and bad taste. Beauty is for those who can make it or pay through the nose for it.
I disagree, there are several examples of recent construction (say, the last ten years or so) in the Mission/La Lengua area that are not done in that aesthetically horrible style.
The complex at Mission and Valencia, for instance, or the one on the corner of Mission and 29th. Neither one are awe-inspiring, certainly, but they’re a hell of a lot better than the bleak and soulless “Mission Bay” type construction.
You and I will have to agree to disagree about the increments of aesthetics in modern cheap housing. Your “bleak and soulless” is my “hey, it’s 202 units where none existed before”. That’s not a bad trade-off, considering that most of us are just going to move to something better when we can afford it.
I don’t have a problem with new housing being built. I’m all for new housing being built.
I have a problem with the new housing being ugly and poorly designed.
It sounds like you would prefer NO housing being built, if it doesn’t measure up to your exacting design standards. Which is how we ended up with Kink.com, lovely in their willingness to improve the property though they are, rather than a lot of cheap housing many years ago.
Again, It seems like you are trying to make this into an Ugly Housing or No Housing thing. That’s absolutely a false dichotomy. As I said, I’m all for more housing, I’m just disappointed and scornful of the crap that is being built here and on some other sites around the Mission.
As for the armory, I didn’t know that there were ever plans to convert it to housing? I would have expected that would be too expensive considering the seismic issues and the fact that a building like that would probably be hard/expensive to convert to apartments?
This project was approved in 1999 (yes, that’s how long it takes sometimes) so I’m hoping that explains the design. Also hoping it’s been updated by now.
Is this the one replacing the Joseph Roesch Building? I loved that old eyesore and thinking about inner mission’s more industrial past.
A “printing plant” used to stand on the site. I think the building has already been demolished some time ago.
Joseph Roesch was a printing company.
They are going to put up an 85 unit shit box on 16th and S. VanNess.
Oops — I should have said Louis Roesch — not Joseph. He was a lithographer and a lot of his stuff is collectable — esp. old fruit crate labels.
this won’t change the neighborhood much, these will be affluent 9-5 condo dwellers with cars who will mostly be driving in and out, probably not spending any time in the neighborhood aside from occasionally douching up the bars on Friday and Saturday nights.
Well, not all of them, considering that there are 202 apartments but only 155 parking spots.
Correct, but I imagine the 20% mentioned above won’t be purchasing the parking spots.
Yeah, probably true.
You may not realize this, but the neighborhood is ALREADY FILLED with people like that. And since you think that people who have no interest in the daily experience of living in the neighborhood will buy condos in it, you’ll never see them anyway. What’s your complaint? The bars are already full of douches from all over the city on Friday and Saturday nights. At least most of these people will have garage parking and won’t be parking on the street. Or hey! Maybe they want to live where they don’t HAVE to have a car.
the coolness must be overwhelming where you hang out on friday and saturday nights.
It’s got trying-not-to-look like a box disease, but it’s not horrible. At least there’s something going on at ground level.
Why does all new construction look like college dorms? It’s like the the construction firm downloaded a free architecture CAD program and decided to go with the tutorial plans to save money. Ugly as shit? Maybe not, boring as shit and totally fucking uninspired crap? Def. It don’t have to be Victorian, it don’t even have to be the federal building to stand out, all it’s got to be is not where I lived in college/every new high density construction going up in the city. (also what’s with that ugly orange they paint everything?)
My beef is that they failed to consider the already existing architecture in the neighborhood. Check out what’s on 14th street and build something that at least mirrors that and doesn’t look like it was flown in from Tampa Florida.
Hear, Hear.
I second that emotion. All these new condo buildings kill me a little every day.
You are lucky to have lived in something modern and this nice in college. Probably went to a publicly-funded school. I went to an expensive private eastern university and lived in a dorm that was pseudo-Georgian on the outside, ultra-bare/basic and cramped on the inside (’cause they took the “poor student” thing seriously 100 years ago when they built it).
Floor plans, unit types, and more:
http://sf-planning.org/ftp/files/LOD/2011/1880%20Mission%20Street.pdf
“PUBLIC ART” TIME!!!
I used to live directly across from the Armory and let me tell you…the “window level views” are not nearly as nice as you might expect, unless you are into middle aged fuglies spanking each other on a dining room table.
“Ima use my scoutmob at WeBeDouchy”
Hardly matters at this point. Just more people to buy the now six-dollar Mission burritos with credit cards and think they’re slumming it.
The Mission used to be a bohemia for weirdo musicans, now the so-called counter-culture consists of foodies and people who think music is made on a laptop.
The neighborhood has an incredible abundance of creative people and activity. Maybe the particular proportions have changed, but the energy is as strong as ever.
New housing is exactly what we need and it’s great news that a private developer is building such a large number of rental units.
You’re a glass half full person, I see.
“The proportions have changed, but the energy is strong” is my new favorite alt-phrase for gentrification.
I’m reminded of the scene in Josh Kornbluth’s “Haiku Tunnel” in which the girl living in her Mission loft beams “Isn’t it great? You can practically feel the ghosts of the artists who used to live here!”
You are a charming person.
Weirdo musicians are now making music on laptops.
And “foodies” deserve no respect because . . . ?
…foodies are to cooking as groupies were to music-making. It’s all about the blow jobs.
Some foodies aren’t about cooking at all–they worship raw food. But I thought the Mission (and San Francisco) was about “to each his own” and that would include “foodies”.
New renderings: http://www.socketsite.com/archives/2011/10/1880_mission_the_revised_designs_and_breaking_new_groun.html#comments
Yep, the editor’s rendering is a old, blurry, and inaccurate.
The new design is the conventional lego-balconied thing we’ve seen over and over again in this town, as opposed to the horrendous stucco complex that sits kitty-corner to the new development. But I say it is an improvement over the original design and am looking forward to its completion.
Not thrilling design, but it will be good to have hundreds of new people caring about that corner of the Mission. It’s been too long.
Oh god, that’s even worse than the original proposal. Dear lord that is horrendous.
Oh, give me a break! Try living in Los Angeles and see how you like all the nice, new buildings.
I’m not exactly sure what you’re saying here. Are you being sarcastic? ASCII IS SO TONEDEAF. Is LA full of old decaying buildings, or new boxy ones?
All I know is that the buildings proposed here are U-G-L-Y ugly.
“ASCII IS SO TONEDEAF.”
And yet, one would normally assume that you are capable of deriving meaning from sentences in written English as displayed in books and newspapers. Blaming The Web for your resistance to any opinion that conflicts with yours is lame.
What? Dude, you are totally misunderstanding me, just as I still honestly have no idea whether you were saying that LA is full of old decaying buildings or new boxy ones. I’m not being sarcastic when I am saying that I can’t tell whether you were being sarcastic.
Really?! OK, here’s some skinny: of course (note the HTML there?) LA has both, but their new buildings are so much worse than anything we have (or could have) here (I grew up there, alright?) that you would have to be almost culturally blind to not see how far above “ugly” the stuff we have here is. Think sub-Geary-on-The-Avenues. Calling this development “ugly” just makes you the Nancy Grace of architectural criticism.
Ok, fair enough. I don’t have a strong impression of LA architecture, when I think about it what comes to mind is Art Deco, craftsman-style and mid-century modern architecture. But, obviously, that is not definitive. Anyway, that’s neither here nor there.
As far as the buildings being built here, are you saying that you don’t think they’re ugly? Because if that’s the case, that’s fine, that’s just differences in aesthetic opinion. What I find ugly, others may find beautiful, and vice-versa.
What I was taking issue with was the idea that are only two choices are Nothing-at-all or this sort of design. I absolutely reject that as a false dichotomy. There are plenty of examples of new buildings being put up that are NOT of that same Mission-Bay type boxy architecture. Clearly it is not the only option.
Well there what little view of the city I have left.
Does anyone know what’s in the building with the mural right next to that lot? I saw Fat Mike holding court with a group of punk rock kids once so I always assumed that building held the offices of Fat Wreck Chords.