The City of San Francisco released a Request For Interest to identify office building conversions that city officials could help expedite with zoning changes, regulatory measures, and financial incentives.
The city’s Office of Economic and Workforce Development and Planning Departments are seeking responses from downtown building owners and sponsors on proposals to convert underused commercial space into housing or other uses. The announcement identifies “office-to-housing” projects as a particular interest, but responses may include conversions of non-residential floor area for other uses.
This is San Francisco’s latest step in an effort to revitalize its downtown in a post Covid-environment where office space is underused while formerly downtown-based employees work from home part-time or full time.
The city recently sponsored a study on how to boost vitality in its financial district. The panel that undertook the study offered recommendations including:
- Creating downtown destination zones through ground-plane activation to help transform public spaces and empty storefronts into city attractions.
- Reducing and restructuring businesses taxes, including the gross receipts tax, commercial rents tax, CEO tax, and transfer tax.
- Providing incentives for office-to-residential conversions to tackle the housing shortage.
- Offering other incentives, such as impact-fee waivers and property tax abatement, as well as reducing zoning and building code barriers to adaptive reuse projects.
City officials are also working on an adaptive reuse roadmap for architects, builders, and developers to adapt projects to current building codes and planned revamped codes.
Related Stories
| Aug 11, 2010
'Feebate' program to reward green buildings in Portland, Ore.
Officials in Portland, Ore., have proposed a green building incentive program that would be the first of its kind in the U.S. Under the program, new commercial buildings, 20,000 sf or larger, that meet Oregon's state building code would be assessed a fee by the city of up to $3.46/sf. The fee would be waived for buildings that achieve LEED Silver certification from the U.
| Aug 11, 2010
Colonnade fixes setback problem in Brooklyn condo project
The New York firm Scarano Architects was brought in by the developers of Olive Park condominiums in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn to bring the facility up to code after frame out was completed. The architects designed colonnades along the building's perimeter to create the 15-foot setback required by the New York City Planning Commission.
| Aug 11, 2010
U.S. firm designing massive Taiwan project
MulvannyG2 Architecture is designing one of Taipei, Taiwan's largest urban redevelopment projects. The Bellevue, Wash., firm is working with developer The Global Team Group to create Aquapearl, a mixed-use complex that's part of the Taipei government's "Good Looking Taipei 2010" initiative to spur redevelopment of the city's Songjian District.
| Aug 11, 2010
Recycled Pavers Elevate Rooftop Patio
The new three-story building at 3015 16th Street in Minot, N.D., houses the headquarters of building owner Investors Real Estate Trust (IRET), as well as ground-floor retail space and 71 rental apartments. The 215,000-sf mixed-use building occupies most of the small site, while parking takes up the remainder.
| Aug 11, 2010
Housing America's Heroes 7 Trends in the Design of Homes for the Military
Take a stroll through a new residential housing development at many U.S. military posts, and you'd be hard-pressed to tell it apart from a newer middle-class neighborhood in Anywhere, USA. And that's just the way the service branches want it. The Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines have all embarked on major housing upgrade programs in the past decade, creating a military housing construction boom.
| Aug 11, 2010
Loft Condo Conversion That's Outside the Box
Few people would have taken a look at a century-old cigar box factory with crumbling masonry and rotted wood beams and envisioned stylish loft condos, but Miles Development Partners did just that. And they made that vision a reality at Box Factory Lofts in historic Ybor City, Fla. Once the largest cigar box plant in the world, the Tampa Box Company produced boxes of many shapes and sizes, spec...
| Aug 11, 2010
World's tallest all-wood residential structure opens in London
At nine stories, the Stadthaus apartment complex in East London is the world’s tallest residential structure constructed entirely in timber and one of the tallest all-wood buildings on the planet. The tower’s structural system consists of cross-laminated timber (CLT) panels pieced together to form load-bearing walls and floors. Even the elevator and stair shafts are constructed of prefabricated CLT.
| Aug 11, 2010
CityCenter Takes Experience Design To New Heights
It's early June, in Las Vegas, which means it's very hot, and I am coming to the end of a hardhat tour of the $9.2 billion CityCenter development, a tour that began in the air-conditioned comfort of the project's immense sales center just off the famed Las Vegas Strip and ended on a rooftop overlooking the largest privately funded development in the U.
| Aug 11, 2010
Giants 300 Multifamily Report
Multifamily housing starts dropped to 100,000 in April—the lowest level in several decades—due to still-worsening conditions in the apartment market. Nonetheless, the April total is below trend, so starts will move progressively back to a still-depressed 150,000-unit pace by late next year.
| Aug 11, 2010
The softer side of Sears
Built in 1928 as a shining Art Deco beacon for the upper Midwest, the Sears building in Minneapolis—with its 16-story central tower, department store, catalog center, and warehouse—served customers throughout the Twin Cities area for more than 65 years. But as nearby neighborhoods deteriorated and the catalog operation was shut down, by 1994 the once-grand structure was reduced to ...
