The Sunset District Needs to Shut Up And Build This Skyscraper
Get used to a growing skyline, San Francisco. (Andreas Strandman, Joshua Fuller)
It’s been one of the greatest fortunes of my life to call the Sunset home since the early summer of 2018. I had just ended a rollercoaster of a year and was glad to get to know the sprawling yet cozy, immense yet familiar district. The only thing about our side of Golden Gate Park that causes me to roll my eyes is our dogged love of keeping new people out of the Sunset. And with former fire chiefs bear macing our homeless neighbors in the Marina and a state mandate to build 82,000 new units by 2031, we’re running out of excuses for the NIMBYism. Now that a 50-story skyscraper could be built near the beach on Sloat Boulevard — bringing 712 new apartments and most importantly 113 affordable units to the area — it’s time to do the city some good and shut up.
Do I really think it should be 50 stories? Not really, but this proposal may be the Godzilla-sized threat it takes to get this part of the city to wake up. I know it’s a spicy take, but think about it this way: the Sunset has done everything it can to obliterate promising projects that would have done even less for working class and poor people. In 2021 the former Police Credit Union on Irving Street began conversion into a seven-story development, but neighbors calling themselves “No Slums in the Sunset” stopped up the project with the usual tactics of injunctions and lawsuits. At city hall and planning meetings, locals relied on illogical, isolationist arguments. Thankfully, a judge threw out the bogus suits and 2550 Irving Street is moving forward with development, a site with 100 percent affordable units. This is as tremendous a win for the future of San Francisco as reunifying the shards of the Dark Crystal in Jim Henson’s aptly-titled puppet gothic drama “The Dark Crystal.” It’s huge.
Before this 50-story proposal in the Outer Sunset, a 12-story proposal at the same site was stopped by a petition that read in part: “We are asking the city to stop this development and create a vision and plan for SF that enhances our neighborhoods, and not allow randomly placed towering complexes to dominate the future of the city.” The Sunset is home to huge empty lots, like the Credit Union which is just beginning to clear red tape two years later. Take just around the corner from my house on Hugo Street where a vacant building still sits empty since 2018 while people pitch tents down the street. One does have to ask what “vision” these property owners might allow — converting Ocean Beach into a flotilla of houseboats? Cutting half of the zoo into tiny houses? And, the obvious question, enhances the neighborhood for whom? Getting a place to live inside would sure enhance the Sunset for those getting bear-sprayed on the sidewalk while trying to catch 40 winks.
Trust me, I love the Sunset and long days at Ocean Beach. But time’s are changing. (Paolo Bicchieri)
It’s part of the district’s ethos to get a slice of the pie then peace out, BLM flag waving and I’m With Her bumper sticker wagging on the fishtailing Prius. During the height of the pandemic, a sidewalk corner near my house became a repository for mutual aid: Think water bottles, N-90 masks, and articles of clothes. When leaving items one afternoon, a fellow west sider came up to me shouting about all the “trash” on “his” sidewalk, then proceeded to throw the gear at me as I walked away. It’s this neighborly love that keeps us from allowing new residents into the district. It breaches on what my nonno, the former head of the anthropology department at Central Washington University, called the “quality of life coefficient.” We all recognize the issue — tremendous housing insecurity in our city — yet can’t fathom turning the dial on our QOL coefficient down by even a modicum to make things better for our shared society. A run-of-the-mill house next door to me sold for $1.8 million a few years ago. How can the teachers commuting from Sacramento at 3:30 a.m. or our roughly 7,754 houseless friends ever hope to escape the violent cycle of housing insecurity if we don’t create opportunities with the privilege we wield?
And while the NIMBYs in my hood will say my ask would hurt their views of the ocean and degrade their property values, the socialists will say this argument allows developers too much lee-way in a city already run rampant by capital-seeking billionaires. Trust me when I say the luxury condos can stay out, the mere mention of the high-rise lifestyle a dogwhistle to many. But we do need to take advantage of whatever intersections of our politics we can as we build campaigns to change our communities for the better. Project Homekey and its state money is an example of a communist-adjacent program I would love to see get the same funding as the endless warfare this country funnels tax dollars into instead. But the Outer Sunset can shoulder more of the cause to rejuvenate our Baghdad by the Bay, plain and simple. And if the argument is that the two- and three-story homes in the neighborhood might lose their slice of the good life, they should’ve built them taller in the first place to accommodate for density or consider adding a story now. A change is coming one way or the other; Planning Department Chief of Staff Dan Sider told the San Francisco Standard this new proposal complies with state and local law. Back in 2021, flyers from the NIMBY forces in the Sunset papered the streets with flyers reading “In just two years, 2550 Irving Street will become the best place in San Francisco to buy Heroin!” Needless to say, I’d say the “vision” my fellow Sunset homies are upset about is the one where they have to swing open that gate they’ve been keeping to one of the city’s finest slept-on neighborhoods.
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