For the second time in two weeks, a new housing development in the Potrero Hill area is going on the open market rather than breaking ground.
First, the hillside condo village at 1000 Mississippi Street (to be rechristened 1001 Texas Street, if it’s ever actually built) started fielding offers, and now an enormous, multi-story housing project on 16th and Wisconsin is courting buyers as well.
Two is not enough to call it a trend, but you’ve got to be curious about any project that spends years slogging through San Francisco’s development purgatory only to try and flip the land at the last minute, especially after making efforts to appease the local neighborhood Boosters Association.
1301 16th Street, which developer and architect Workshop1 calls Potrero Flats, has been in the works since 2013. It won unanimous approval in April after downgrading its original, 200-plus unit plan to a mere 172 (40 percent one bedrooms, the rest a mix of two and three beds).
Permissions include almost 10,000 feet of retail and PDR space too, and over 38,000 feet of development altogether.
So why the sale? The developers of the Mississippi Street project on the other side of Potrero Hill are testing the waters to see if any buyers can offer a low-risk deal preferable to building in a potentially softening market, and there’s an element of that here too.
But owner Ronaldo Cianciarulo told Curbed SF that he never really meant to see the thing through to completion, or at least not on his own.
"I’m 72. It’s a very big building, a lot of risk, and I’ve never built anything new before." Cianciarulo’s previous notable developments have always been renovations. At the very least he’d want a partner on something this size, or possibly just to pass it off to someone else entirely.
No price is listed, so it’s a "make an offer" kind of deal. The site is presently home only to a mostly disused warehouse, which we called a "sad concrete bunker" in 2014. Harsh, but fair.
- 1301 Sixteenth [Workshop1]
- 1301 16th Street listing [Loopnet]
- Unbuilt Dogpatch Development For Sale [Curbed SF]
- Sad Concrete Bunker Could Make Way For Condos [Curbed SF]