Today, District 3 Supervisor Aaron Peskin will introduce legislation that will pave the way to build an affordable-housing development above SFFD's Station 13 (530 Sansome St.).

If approved, the proposal would grant the property’s 200-foot air rights to the Mayor’s Office of Housing and Community Development to build between 100 and 150 units of affordable housing, while the Fire Department would maintain ownership of the land, as well as a new station.

As the Chronicle reported yesterday, this proposal to blend affordable housing with civic use isn’t necessarily new. Housing was first brought up at the Sansome Street fire station back in 1975, and Peskin resurfaced the idea when he became a supervisor in 2002.

Currently, three development projects have been proposed for the block, including a 200-foot tall 309-room hotel on Washington Street and a 20-story tower that will have 182 hotel rooms and eight housing units, also on Washington Street.

As the Chron reported, even though the area has 200-foot zoning, the majority of buildings on the block are only two- or three-story structures: the only exception is a 20-story office building at Washington and Battery streets that was built in the early 1980s.

Supervisor Peskin’s proposed affordable-housing redevelopment of the 9,000-square-foot Sansome Street fire station reportedly isn’t considered historic and wouldn't cause any issues with shadows.

Other cities in the US and Canada are already building new housing developments above firehouses, such as Vancouver, Calgary and Washington DC, where developers placed a racquet and squash club between the fire station and the housing units above as a noise buffer.

Ken Cleaveland, San Francisco’s Fire Commission president, told the Chronicle he supported Supervisor Peskin’s proposal, saying he’d “love to see the air rights put to good use and get a new fire station as a bonus.”

“When you live in a dense, dense city like San Francisco, you have to use the space that you have,” Cleaveland was quoted as saying.