730 Stanyan Street in San Francisco is OMA’s New York’s first foray into affordable housing, but there’s nothing remotely cut-rate about its appearance.
This clever and deftly articulated building opened in late July, fronting the eastern end of Golden Gate Park in Haight-Ashbury. Glass fibre reinforced concrete (GFRC), a light-weight precast cement composite, makes for an elegant and thrifty envelope for a sinuous building that provides 160 vitally-needed affordable housing units for San Francisco, the most expensive urban rental market in the United States.
Other firms have amply demonstrated that affordable housing needn’t forsake design distinction in recent years: Lorcan O’Herlihy, Brooks Scarpa Huber Architects and Michael Maltzan in California; and Grimshaw, David Adjaye and, soon, even Herzog and de Meuron in New York. With 730 Stanyan, OMA has joined their ranks with style.
The city purchased a grimy McDonald's on the site in 2017, intending to use the lot for affordable housing. Two nonprofits, the Chinatown Community Development Center (CCDC) and the Tenderloin Neighborhood Development Center (TNDC), applied to develop the site. Each has developed numerous projects in the city; the former houses over 5,000 tenants in their buildings, the latter more than 6,800. The Mayor’s Office of Housing and Community Development suggested that the two organisations join forces for the project.
Bo Han, associate director of housing development for the Chinatown CDC had been greatly impressed by OMA and San Francisco firm YA Studio’s 2019 collaboration on the Avery Tower at the city’s Transbay development. She encouraged the two practices to collaborate in a submission, which beat out 16 competitors. Most firms selected are local; this was a rare win for a team located largely outside the Bay area.
‘We wanted somebody who really understands urban context and could make the needed gesture to make this building fit well into the site, but also something that didn't look like typical affordable housing,’ she says.
The financing for affordable housing projects in San Francisco is complex. The city provides predevelopment funding, with contributions from city, state, federal and other sources making up the rest of the project. 730 Stanyan failed to win state support but former mayor London Breed, who was previously district supervisor for the site, assisted in obtaining additional city funding. The city owns the site; the project has been granted a 75 year lease with a 24 year option to extend.
Paul Wang, associate principal at YA Studio, explains their role as ‘local community outreach, obtaining entitlements and navigating the City’s complicated permitting process, solving code related issues, documenting and overseeing the construction of the building.’
YA had worked on a number of affordable housing projects previously, but OMA was new to the game. Han, of the Chinatown CDC, explains, ‘when OMA and YA Studio put their fee proposal together, Jason Long cut his hourly fee by one-third, yet the design team gave it all throughout the entire design process.’
One of OMA’s struggles was simply to fit in as many units as possible, yet avoiding a domineering form in the process. ‘We could have done an eight-storey wraparound building, but you would end up with a cold, big, unprogrammed outdoor space, and a lot of mass at the perimeter that would have felt very out of keeping with the neighbourhood,’ OMA principal Jason Long explains.
There were risks in other directions. The Haight Ashbury Neighborhood Council, among others, objected to its height. ‘There was a lot of push from some people in the community to break this down into a more forced set of fake townhouses, or to bring colour into the project in a very dramatic way. We resisted both of those efforts and tried to use instead this idea of the facade articulation through the GFRC panels,’ Long adds.
The envelope is complex, roughly resembling an abstract W in plan, with additional portions carved out at various levels: there are four-story corner volumes in a display of deference to the neighborhood’s scale. Otherwise, most of the building’s height is concentrated at the site’s centre.
The facade is serrated and swoops with cantilevers providing repeat visual interest. ‘The GFRC panels are shaped as a kind of wave, which is a nod to bay windows, but also just gives us a tool to modulate the facade. It reflects the scale of the townhouses in the neighbourhood,’ Long explains. ‘Additionally we curved it to reflect the organic quality of the park’.
One neighbourly gesture is a scoop on the building’s north side to recess the facade to meet the street frontage of a Victorian neighbor.
The GFRC panels are mounted onto a steel frame, with windows and mechanical louvers integrated before placement. ‘As long as the modules are standardized it's actually very economical as a building skin system,’ Long says.
The designers did not have an opulent budget. ‘One of our concerns with the building was that it might end up feeling a little bit institutional,’ Long says.
One of their nimble methods of combatting this risk was simply making sharp use of space. The residential units are not especially large but living rooms were located to maximise corner windows and provide a sense of spaciousness. The lobby is airy and amply lit, located between the building’s front and internal courtyard (there’s another courtyard for a daycare on the ground floor). The lobby features characteristic OMA touches: rounded columns; a perforated metal ceiling; and a diagonal mailbox volume that becomes a bench facing parkwards.
Elevators open onto views of Golden Gate Park. Long says, ‘Every time you step out of the elevator you’re reoriented to the park. Everyone gets the park view every day.’ The fifth floor terraces offer additional green space. The laundry room is not located in a grim basement, but next to one of these terraces. Economical supergraphics nodding to late San Francisco design doyenne Barbara Stauffacher Solomon inject additional fun for the mere cost of paint.
The building’s outdoor spaces are also artful. There’s a merry-go-round and a climbing wall that might be mistaken for an art installation in the main courtyard. Landscaping by GLS Landscape Architecture is set low for stormwater management needs but the effect is adventurous. There are two murals on the building by local artists, a floral nod to the area’s hippie heyday facing the inside of the block by Sorell Raino-Tsui and a more abstracted composition by Jenifer Wofford along one facade.
In addition to the daycare centre, the building also includes retail space, which is rare for such projects but was intentional to continue Haight street’s retail corridor; the city’s legendary Amoeba Music is right next door.
The project is also achieving a great deal of good. Every unit was leased before it even opened. Thirty-two units were set aside for formerly-homeless residents and 32 units for Section 8 tenants. It contains a comparatively large number of three bedroom units for families. Eligibility for the remaining apartments was set at 60 percent of the area’s median income.
730 Stanyan marks the first entirely-affordable housing on San Francisco’s west side. The building might prove a model in other regards, ‘This project was the first 100 percent affordable development [in the city] to use precast-concrete as the primary façade system to reduce the overall construction schedule,’ Wang says.
Affordable housing is so necessary it almost doesn’t matter what it looks like; everyone wins when the result is this attractive.