It would have been entirely understandable if the pandemic had prompted Enrique Landa to hit the pause button on the $2 billion redevelopment of San Francisco’s Potrero Power Station, which was shut down a decade ago.
After all, the project will have a bunch of office space and how many of us are going to offices these days? It will have a hotel and the tourism and convention travel are still mostly dead. It will include rental housing and rents are down 25%. Condos will be available to buy but the condo market in San Francisco is soft.
But rather than regard the dizzying array of uncertainties as a reason to put the project on the back-burner, Landa did the opposite: the partner at Associate Capital went all in, more than doubling the amount of housing, commercial space, and infrastructure that will be built in the first phase of the redevelopment of the old power plant, which sits on 29-acres just to the south of Pier 70.
Instead of 315 housing units, the initial phase will have 735, including a free-standing affordable building with about 100 homes. Instead of $100 million in “horizontal” work — the utilities, streets, sidewalks and parks that provide the bones of a new neighborhood — Landa’s group is doing $300 million. Instead of three commercial buildings it will have four. A 2.5 acres park will also now be part of the first phase as will the restoration of the historic brick Station A.
Completing 85% of the infrastructure work in the first phase — rather than the 25% originally planned — will create flexibility, Landa said. The infrastructure work will take about two years and by then the shape of the economic recovery from the pandemic should be clearer, with a better sense of housing trends and how to position the office and residential buildings.
“We are creating more opportunities for life science, more opportunities for office, more opportunities for housing,” Landa said. “Who is going to be the winner coming out of the pandemic we don’t know, but we don’t have to make that choice today.”
Construction workers are seen inside station A at the old Potrero Power Plant. Preserving aspects of the plant were important to the project.
Nick Otto/Special to The ChronicleThe redevelopment of the power station, approved last August, will eventually include 2,600 housing units, 1.6 million square feet of commercial space and 7 acres of parkland. There will be a grocery store and a hotel overlooking the bay, which will be adapted from a former 1965 steampower station. The project will be anchored by the historic 300-foot concrete smokestack, which will be the centerpiece of a new open space called Stack Park.
In total 30% of the project’s housing will be affordable units — for families making 60% of area median income, currently $79,000 a year — and it will offer $860 million in public benefits. Included are an extension of the Bay Trail, a soccer field, a 25,000 square foot YMCA, a day care center and 36 units of housing run by a homeless prenatal group.
Work has already started on the preservation of Station A, which has been shored up with 4,000 linear feet of steel. Demolition will start next month on six smaller buildings that sit between the two power stations that are being saved.
Mayor London Breed called it “the epitome of housing-first development.”
A history buff who bought and restored the historic Swedish American Music Hall a few years ago, Landa said he “geeked out” on histories of pandemics during the shutdown.
“Pandemics shake stuff up in ways you don’t expect,” he said. “So these large projects need to be in a position to be responsive to whatever comes next.”
Landa thinks the post-pandemic world will eventually be characterized by “a pent-up demand for everything” and that it will be hard to go wrong with waterfront land and a mix of historic and new buildings just south of Mission Bay and Pier 70.
Out of all of San Francisco’s “mega-projects” the power station redevelopment has been the fastest. Associate Capital, which is backed by former Hewlett-Packard CEO Meg Whitman, bought the property in August of 2016, submitted plans a year later and got the plan approved last April. It was 44 months from acquisition to the start of construction.
The project sits in the Dogpatch at the foot of Potrero Hill. JR Eppler, president of the Potrero Boosters, said, the neighborhood pushed the developer to preserve Station A, which originally be demolished.
“For a building that was not part of the original plan it’s wonderful to see the effort that Associate Capital is taking to make sure to make sure it is preserved to fullest extent possible,” he said.
The company’s confidence in the project has only been bolstered by the progress at Pier 70, the 69-acre redevelopment project to the north. The developer there, Brookfield Properties, has built out the streets grid and the Port of San Francisco has completed Crane Cove Park, which opened last year.
Landa called Crane Cove “the most successful activation of a park that I have ever seen.”
“It showed the appeal of being next to the water, especially in the last year when everyone has been spending so much time indoors,” he said. “You can see the yearning of this district to be reconnected to its waterfront.”
For decades residents in the southeast corner of the city fought to shut down the power plant, one of California’s oldest and dirtiest. PG&E finished most of the site clean-up in 2018, including the removal of three storage tanks.
Former District 10 Supervisor Sophie Maxwell spent years working to close down the plant, as well as one to the south in the Bayview District, which was shut in 2006. The district, one of the city’s poorest and most underserved, was a dumping ground for industrial uses that wealthier neighborhoods would never have allowed to take root.
Maxwell said that the progress on the site “means that hard work and good people and community can make things happen.”
“This is what a collective vision looks like,” Maxwell said. “In District 10 we have the most waterfront and the most beaches in the city but we have never had access to them from one end to the other.”
J.K. Dineen is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: jdineen@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @sfjkdineen
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