As you might have read in our previous coverage, the city plans to build affordable housing at Broadway and Front Street, in an area that is currently a parking lot. Groundbreaking for that project isn't expected to start until sometime in 2017.
So neighbors were caught off guard when one (who wishes to remain anonymous) found an online request for proposals, issued by the Chinatown Community Development Center (CCDC), to place 32 units of mobile, temporary housing on the same site.
The RFP indicated a set of factory-built trailers would be placed at 88 Broadway and 735 Davis St. for at least a year. The sites include a Port of San Francisco-run lot (Seawall Lot 322-1), and an SF Public Works lot.
But the proposal isn't moving forward. "It’s not happening," Amy Beinart of CCDC told us. "We had to get enough information to even talk to the stakeholders. This was a very preliminary fact-finding effort."
Beinart is the Rental Assistance Demonstration (RAD) strategies coordinator for CCDC, which is working on rehabilitating public housing in Chinatown. The idea was that trailers could serve as temporary housing for residents while their buildings undergo renovations, but that's now off the table. "Between the timing and the cost and the various approvals and setup, it just didn’t seem like an option we needed to continue to explore," she said.
Some neighbors who had concerns about the new addition are relieved. "It appears the idea has been dropped," the Barbary Coast Neighborhood Association said in a statement to Hoodline. "Given our ongoing discussions with the Port and the MOHCD about development on that site, we assume there would have been a thorough public review with the community if the idea was ever seriously considered."
Neighbors weren't alerted because "in order to even get a conversation with the Planning Department to find out what the approval process would be," Beinart said, "we needed to get some plans and calculations. If we had gone forward, we would have used public funds that we used for other affordable housing to cover, so we had to do an RFP."
So what will happen to the people that CCDC had hoped to house in the trailers? "We’re using a combination of many market-rate units, and finding them as close to Chinatown as we possibly can," Beinart said. "There are a few people who might take the option of living with friends and family for the period. We can’t use our own affordable housing units when there are vacancies, for the most part, because there are funder restrictions. We’re working very deeply with individual households to find out what works for them."
A community meeting about the affordable housing site held in July.
Neighborhood groups have long been involved in the process for the permanent development on the Broadway & Front site, and fought to have middle-income and senior housing—not just low-income housing—included in the plan. Proposal submissions for the project were due on February 29th, and are being reviewed now.
The CCDC has developed two other affordable low-income apartment buildings within two blocks of the site: the Broadway Family Apartments (810 Battery St.) and Broadway-Sansome Apartments (255 Broadway).
