A surface parking lot on Irving Street in San Francisco's Inner Sunset is one step closer to becoming housing, with a newly filed application proposing three four-story townhouse-style buildings holding nine market-rate apartments at 2513 Irving Street. The revised plan increases the unit count from an earlier proposal filed in 2025, and it lands directly across the street from a 90-unit affordable housing complex that just reached full occupancy.
According to San Francisco YIMBY, the preliminary application calls for three separate four-story structures, each containing three units, for a total of nine apartments. The filing includes parking for nine cars and nine bicycles. Property owner Coleman Kao filed the application through One Ark LLC, with RKD Consulting handling the application and design work. No construction timeline, project illustrations, or details about the buildings' future design have been shared yet.
The site currently holds a surface parking lot that was formerly owned by Police Credit Union, which is based in San Bruno. An earlier permit application for the same address, filed in February 2025, had proposed a smaller eight-unit, three-story mixed-use building, with previous plans drafted by LPAS Architecture + Design for the former owners. That 2025 filing leaned on California Senate Bill 423, the state law that mandates a 90-day ministerial approval window for qualifying housing projects.
A Family Zoning Plan Boost
The latest application instead invokes San Francisco's Family Zoning Plan, the citywide upzoning package that the Board of Supervisors approved in a 7-4 vote in December 2025 under Mayor Daniel Lurie, according to KTVU. That plan upzoned western and northern neighborhoods to help the city meet state-mandated housing targets and protect state infrastructure funding. Construction on the nine-apartment project is estimated to cost approximately $6 million.
The density bump traces back to a more specific local rule. San Francisco's Family Housing Opportunity Special Use District ordinance, codified as Planning Code Section 249.94, sets a minimum residential density requirement of nine units for developments built on sites created through a three-lot merger in RH-1 zones, according to SF Planning. That 2023 ordinance was designed to encourage multi-family infill in high-resource westside neighborhoods like the Sunset. A separate listing from April 2026 had marketed the 0.17-acre site as shovel-ready, with a completed lot merger and SB 423 entitlement package, at an asking price of $1,950,000, per Vanguard Properties.
Across The Street, A Very Different Kind Of Housing
The 2513 Irving Street site sits directly across from where a former bank building once stood. That former Police Credit Union bank space was demolished and replaced by a seven-story affordable housing complex at 2550 Irving Street, developed by TNDC. The complex reached full occupancy this July, filling all 90 units reserved for working families, formerly unhoused residents, and veterans, according to SF YIMBY. TNDC celebrated the grand opening of that building last month.
The financial backbone of that project extends well beyond a ribbon-cutting. San Francisco's Citywide Affordable Housing Loan Committee approved up to $8.6 million in Local Operating Subsidy Program funding this April to support 15 years of supportive housing operations for 22 units at 2550 Irving Street, per city meeting records from SF.gov. Those subsidies are meant to offset operating deficits for units serving extremely low-income households, giving this single block of Irving Street two starkly different housing models within a few hundred feet of each other.
Decades Of Slow Growth Behind The Push
The contrast reflects a much longer story of stalled housing production on the city's west side. Academic housing data compiled by the Cornell Real Estate Review found that Supervisorial District 4, which includes this stretch of the Sunset, generated only 26 net new affordable units and 64 total net new units between 2010 and 2020, despite receiving more than 5,000 affordable housing applications from district residents in fiscal year 2019-2020 alone.
State officials have taken notice of San Francisco's pace more broadly. A housing accountability report issued by Governor Gavin Newsom's office found that San Francisco maintained California's longest housing development approval timelines among cities statewide, prompting mandates that restrict local discretionary delays. City leaders had already begun responding before that report, introducing Housing For All legislation in April 2023 to eliminate discretionary review hearings for projects that comply with base zoning, part of a push toward a state-mandated goal of 82,069 new homes by 2031, according to SF.gov.
Not every proposal in the Sunset has moved this quietly. A December 2024 plan for a 22-story, 446-unit mixed-income tower at 2700 Sloat Boulevard drew significant community debate after it replaced an even larger, since-withdrawn 50-story concept, as Hoodline previously reported. The nine-unit townhouse project at 2513 Irving Street, by contrast, is small enough and compliant enough with base zoning to move through the city's newer streamlined pathways without the discretionary hearings that have snagged larger towers.
