After years stuck in planning purgatory, a massive 67-story residential tower at South Van Ness and Market is finally edging toward construction. If it actually gets built, the project would drop roughly a thousand new apartments into one of San Francisco’s most heavily rezoned corridors.
As first reported by the San Francisco Business Times and summarized by SFist, developer Crescent Heights has started pricing out construction, design, and engineering teams and is gearing up to begin work in 2027. The renewed push comes after a planning process that has stretched at least eight years and cycled through several earlier design versions.
Permits And Design Have Grown
Formal permits filed in early March indicate that the tower has been scaled up to approximately 780 feet in height and will feature roughly 1,104 apartments, including 84 units at below-market rates, according to San Francisco YIMBY. Those same filings also lay out about 18,570 square feet of ground-floor retail, plus a two-level basement garage with space for 283 cars, and they include requests to use Senate Bill 423 and the state density-bonus law to boost the project’s capacity further.
Where This Fits In The Hub And The City’s Housing Math
The triangular site at Van Ness and Market is located within the Market & Octavia area plan. It would connect to earlier projects, such as 1550 Mission and 30 Otis, according to SFist. The San Francisco Chronicle notes that the city needs to permit approximately 82,000 homes by 2031 to meet state requirements, and high-profile developments like this are being closely watched as part of that effort.
Timing And The Economic Hurdle
Even with Crescent Heights lining up teams, builders say the basic math is still rough. “Land prices are still expensive, the cost of construction is still expensive, interest rates are still relatively high, it still takes far too long to get a permit,” Residential Builders Association president Sean Keighran told the San Francisco Chronicle. Crescent Heights has also signaled it will seek credit for past contributions to affordable housing as part of the project’s financial calculus, which leaves an open question about how many units, if any, will ultimately be reserved at below-market rates.
With permits in and teams being priced out, the corner of South Van Ness and Market is set to become one of the city’s most-watched real estate sites over the next 18 months. The key things to watch now are whether financing is secured, what final approvals the city grants, and whether Crescent Heights decides to opt for rentals, condos, or a hybrid mix for those 67 stories of new homes.
