The Facts

The old car wash at Divisadero and Oak is finally becoming housing, thanks to Supervisor Bilal Mahmood. Greystar, the largest developer of apartments in the US, is scheduled to break ground on October 19 to build an eight-story building with 203 apartments and ground-floor retail, in a scoop reported by J.K. Dineen at the San Francisco Chronicle.

Mahmood's permit-expiration reform and other bureaucratic fixess finally made the building pencil out, saving about $4 million in construction costs, according to the builder.

It will be the first significant market-rate apartment building to begin construction in San Francisco this year.

The Context

Housing was first proposed here a decade ago, and the developer went through over 1,000 community meetings before giving up. Dean Preston, the former Supervisor, tried hard to kill this building by insisting the city fund fully taxpayer subsidized apartments on the land, even though no funding was available.

In February last year, we reported that this new plan finally won streamlined approval under Assembly Bill 2011, a state law allowing qualifying apartments on commercial land to bypass discretionary review. But the approved plans still couldn't be built without some more local fixes.

The GrowSF Take

We put up a billboard promising Bilal Mahmood would fix this stalled project. He did.

Mahmood found a specific cost blocking construction, changed the law, and helped turn approved plans into financed homes. His success shows that all we need to do to fix San Francisco is to keep electing sensible people instead of ideologues.