the project sponsor for further comment on the design. >> thank you. >> project sponsor. >> good afternoon, president fong, commissioners. my name is daniel, and i am a principle of (inaudible) development a local firm here in san francisco it is my pleasure to present to you 400 grove street in part of the (inaudible) neighborhood plan. with gdg partners who is co-developing the project with us, together we have a strong commitment to the (inaudible) neighborhood plan. in addition to the 400 grove street and we are developing 200 projects in the neighborhood and one of which is you approved last september. and all of which we believe will help to fulfill the vision of the neighborhood plan and revitalize the area. >> it is located in the haze valley just three blocks from the project site and our

project manager lives in the neighborhood and managed the development of it at 55 page street. as you know 400 grove street was once part of the off-ramp that stretched through blieting the neighborhood and today it serves as a surface parking lot which is not the highest and best use for the urban prop. after purchasing this parcel, we hired (inaudible) of the san francisco based award winning (inaudible) architecture. she has worked with market activity plan to design an outstanding mixed use building and help to beautify a very busy stretch of the street. it will bring numerous (inaudible) and fulfill the goals. it will take a former freeway site and transform it into a beautiful new landmark building and bring the positive activity to the corners of goff and grove street doner the day and

at night. it will boost the local economy and add 34 housing units with a good mix of studios, one and two units with over half suitable for families. it will add 4 bmr units on site to better housing into the community and will limit parking to 0.5 spaces per unit to promote public transportation over vehicles. it will have at least 25 bikes stall to promote modes of transportation and will add a dramatic restaurant space to a prominent corner to activate the pedestrian realm as well as close an empty stretch of retail. it will be environmentally sensitive by integrating the storm water capbility into the landscape feature of the building. it will create high density housing in a transit rich location that has more than a dozen cities and regional mass transit lines nearby. in terms of out reach, the project enjoys broad support.

we have strong letters of support from the neighborhood association and the housing action coalition, and we have the support of our neighbors at 300 across the street. we ask for your support of this project today as recommended by the planning department. we believe that the city can be very proud of this project and the benefits that it will bring to this neighborhood and the elegant statement that it will make on the corner of goff and grove. thank you for your consideration, i am pleased to introduce the architect who will present the design, thank you. >> hello, president fong and commissioners, we are delighted to be presenting you here this project today. i will go through it kind of quickly, i think that you have gotten a lot of the facts. >> if you could state your name. >> an fugeron. >> any way, we are worked on other parcels actually on the market plan and actually worked on one of the first

redevelopment agencies that was parcel a and so we are thrilled to be able to continue to work on goff street and helping to improve that environment. i think that you all know where the site is, this is parcel h, this is one of the last sites that is made available on goff street from the demolition of the freeway. so the important parcels were surrounded by the building by david baker and so we are trying hard to keep up with him. this is parcel h, it is a very funny, kind of site in the sense that it has a dog like here and i am not going a very good job, this 25 foot by 25 foot dog leg that used to be the rear yard and so we wind up with the funny conditions and because it is the last sight to be put on to this dense block we actually had to work pretty hard to figure out a way to site this building so it mid gated the site and try to

safety as many of the problems created by a new infield project. there are as you can tell from this, just the different sort of heights, the limits are happening in the site. our site is bisected in two, facing goff and 60 feet in. and we have a 50 feet height limit and going down grove street by 100 feet we have the 40-foot height limit and so the building will step down as it goes towards grove street and we will use that as a way to sort of engage the buildings on grove which are smaller buildings and one and two stories and the taller buildings on goff street and so that was an important part of it. the other thing that was important was to figure out how to do a building to create the best open space possible. one of the excuses of the site as it, there are existing patterns that are different from a normal san francisco site because they are not in the middle of the block, but there is also the issue of the big wall along the property which is a blank wall and was

built there as a property line wall and we will talk about how we chose to do that later on. so just a quick project facts that you have heard before, the project is between 5 and 4 stories, the height is between 45 and 55 feet, we took advantage of the 15-foot height for the base and we could create a really nice sort of retail space, right at the corner of goff and grove as well as walk up units on grove and goff street. the unit mix is there, we have 52 present two bedrooms and the rest of the mix is studios and one bedrooms and there are four on sight bmrs which 50 percent of them will be units. there are only 17 parking spaces as for the plan and there are 25-plus bike park and then about a 2,000 commercial space. this is very quickly the plan, there is a basement parking but we are only going down five

feet to mitigate as much as possible, excavating too much and that is the parking as well as bike storage in the corner and what is important about the project for us was the site planning strategy on the ground floor, we put the commercial space right at the corner, the lobby entrance is here on grove street and you can see all the way across to the courtyard, the courtyard is five feet above grade but there is also a huge opening in here two stories, off of goff street which allows you to see in from the street all the way through the courtyard all the way across to the open space in the mid block. we tried to create in this project more of a sense of opening to the street to keep goff street being a canyon wall and to begin to relate the building more to the existing environment and we also then chose to build againsting the property line wall of 525 goff to be able to mitigate sort of that wall and also to get all of the units to face common courtyard, to maximize the

southern exposure on all of the units and to avoid having a double loaded corner building but actually to do two single loaded buildings and thus improving the quality of light and air for all of the units on the site and allowing us to have all two bedroom unitwise double if not triple aspect windows which is important for the degree feature and the livebility of the units on that site. and then that is just typical floor plans, we have two bedrooms, always at the corners again, this is the big port tal that is opened on two floors, i am not doing a very good job of this thing which i will show you this in three dimensional later on. on the top floor, there say bunch of open space and some of them are private for some of the residences and there is also a nice two and communal open space that looks down on to grove street and that will be used by all of the residents in the building. there is the courtyard space in

the middle of the building that we are trying to create as a space for everybody that lived in the building as well as the beautiful space to look at it. it will have seating and smaller courtyard spaces off the residential units and really be a place that we hope all of the residents can use. we will go now to this is the site as it is now, with no building in there. and then this is the building inside, really trying to sort of kind of match the urban wall created by the existing projects already on goff street. when you can see this idea of this wave action, this is the big portal, that we talked about, opening out on to goff where you can see directly into the courtyard and all the way across to the opening space beyond and there is also a transparent kind of piece here to the restaurant space, so you can see up the restaurant space and into the courtyard also as well as a lot of kind of planters that are in there to work for the storm management and water management system that is now part of the san

francisco code. this is the building at the corner for an after. so really sort of a strong presence trying to create a dynamic new facade and quite open to the exterior and we are using the combination to the lattice to provide the shading and siding to mimic and play with the idea of the buildings that have the residential quality with the woodsiding th. is grove before and after, the building drops down to 45 feet on the lowest and 55 on the higher corner, we will have a residential lobby, and so this is the residential lobby where you can see the people, and you can see across the lobby and right next door to it is a single lane entrance for the park pag garage and then the big cafe we hope will activate the street and help sort of draw people in to the building. >> and then finally just in terms of how the building looks.

we have worked a lot in san francisco and we are very cognasent of the building and kind of the mod lacing that they create in the street we wanted to think through a slightly before interpreted way and so we elongated the bay windows and we have them in the same way that san francisco bay windows are and we are working on a 25 foot module and so we are getting a lot of variation and so the waves come in and out on the different waves on the different floors, but between the horizontal and the vertical, we are able to achieve a building that does not get very big kind of articulated masses but is broken up into a series of one or two story composition which i think will help to mitigate the scale of the building in terms of goff down to grove and

becomes a residential scale. and then there is the transparent, of course, ground floor and then we wanted to work in the tradition of woodsiding and the field rather than doing a more kind of what i say, industrial material, again, trying to sort of play with the existing fabric of san francisco. and so, we chose to do a cedar panels with a kind of a half round baten system that will be applied on the cedar panels and they will both sometimes be a lattice that will provide the sun shading for the windows as well as an extra layer on top of the flat panels to give you a modulation to create a fine grain environment and that just shows you the standard details and the building is set on the 30 floor and we will be able to get some sort of green space on the third floor to break up the

mass of the building further. that is just a picture of the building, at night. >> thank you. >> any other speakers for the project sponsor? >> okay. seeing none, we will open it up for public comment. and i do have a few speaker cards, gary shilling? >> robin leavitt. tim colin. alan mark and michael alder. >> good afternoon, commissioners, my name is gary shilling i am the president of the full ton grove home owners association with the northwest portion of the proposed project at 400 grove street and i am here to represent several home owners that have significant concerns about the proposed development.

in general we appreciate and applaud the effort of the developers and the architect that they have made to fit into the neighborhood in which the street scape with the retail and a large portal on to goff and reinforce the market plan which some of our residents were instrumental in actually developing. and promoting. we are however, concerned about the height of the building, mid block along the western edge at the northwest corner of the parcel. but the building rises four stories above the 5-foot height parking podium resulting in a tall wall, facing several yards that belong to owners in our development. creating privacy and solar exposure for our owners which should be mitigated. >> the proposed bedrooms at the west elevation of the project has significant glazing to the west looking into existing private gardens. two other buildings, as shown. oh, how do i... >> go ahead.

>> all right. two other buildings on fulton grove east property line that you can see in the drawing here, north of the proposed project, modified their mass during the design phase and traded set backs to limit their mid block bulk and then shadows. you can see this here and also some what incorrectly shown in the rendering but what we drew over there kind of actually shows what does happen. so that there is an open set back through those two buildings on the parcels. they have modified their massing in response to our concerns and in the previous developments and it really minimized the effect of the bulk on the backyards of the units of our project which are these units here. we strongly feel that the glass

proposed in the design at the bedrooms on the taller part of the building is not an adequate response to the bulkness of the project in the northwest corner and interest that they step back the top two floors as shown in the sketch here. in the past few weeks we have had discussions with the developer and we would like to ask for a continuance so that we can continue to have a dialogue and reach a mutually agreeable conclusion. so we can whole heartedly endorse this project which we think otherwise is an accident addition to the neighborhood. >> thank you. >> next speaker? >> good afternoon, commissioners, robin weather here i am a long time resident of haze valley and a member of the neighborhood association. i'm pleased to be here today to support this project. it fully complies with the market octavia plan and has

minimum parking and provide the units on site and it is a beautiful building that will come mrement the neighborhood. i come mend them for putting together a great project and hope that you support it. >> i want to bring up a important issue in regard to this as well as many projects under construction approved or seeking your approval for the market octavia area. these projects consists of thousands of units that will house thousands of people in this very dense area. in my opinion that is not a bad thing, but where are the infrastructure improvements especially with regard to transportation that are needed to accommodate all of these new folks, streets in the haze valley area are among the most heavily trafficked in the city. intersections just a few blocks from this project are among the most dangerous in this state. and may meet market octavia and golf. we have a lot of serious

congestion and bike safety problems now. what is going to happen in the future when the projects are built and occupied. to make the matters worse you may be aware that the city wants to take millions of dollars from the sale of the former freeway parcels this is one of them that was ear marked specifically for transportation improvements in the area and did divert those to other neighborhoods >> as good as projects like this one, unless we have money to address the transportation needs i question how you can justify approving the developments when the streets around them are unsafe and dysfunctional. >> in the future i urge you to consider this question when reviewing the projects like the one before you in the market area. thank you very much. >> thank you. >> good afternoon, commissioners, tim collen on behalf of the housing action coalition. and the project sponsors has

presented this to us a couple of weeks ago, pretty recently so as scam belled to get it ready, our position ready and through all of the peer review as normally do. we love property ject for the reasons that you have heard, on site, brm but more broadly i think what came out of our was this is a market plan and this project is one more step in creating a great neighborhood. this is a wonderful project and in an evolving neighborhood it is not luxury yus and it is pleasant and it has the amenities that we like to see in san francisco neighborhoods on the question of parking, the projects that we have been seeing coming through the market in the octavia area are going for as of right parking and they are getting approved as of right and we have long

wanted to have a lot of successful examples of this. that we can do this, and the sky won't fall. that it is possible to build these types of excellent, excellent design projects, and the dense urban neighborhood and reduce the park and it works. and so this is yet another step in this process, that we would like to see continue. and commend you and the commission has been very good about saying no this is what the neighbors what, the as of right is the right level. this is another one, i think that this absolutely taking the neighborhood in the direction that it should go and i hope that you will approve it. >> thank you. >> >> thank you, commissioners, my name is alan mark, president of the mark, company, our key focus is research. if we look at the number of

condos at the height of the market in 2007, there were 2500 to 3,000. >> today there are under 50 market rate condos for sale in san francisco. in terms of new construction. and it is closer to 30, actually. and if you desire to move into a brand new building that opens this year, you would not have the ability to move into a market rate condo until october or november of this year. and there are about 3600 apartments under construction as we speak. and there are only about 350 condos under construction today. and that is in five different projects, and of those five, most of them have occupantcy in the beginning of 2014. so, there is a dire need for market rate housing, the nice thing about this project is it does fill up a lot that has not been used in years. as well as it is only 38 units,

the average size is just over 800 square feet. which keeps it in a more affordable range for condos. and so i do support this project. it does help fill this neighborhood. and thank you. for your time. >> thank you. >> good afternoon, commissioners, my name is michael adler and i am the president of caner north constructers ink i have been part of it since 1978 not many weeks ago this developer approved by you 400 grove represents the best of and for san francisco. the right size for the neighborhood and it is not a commodity structure. but one which has been thoughtfully and heartfully designed by ann and her team and developed and built by local folks who care about the community. this is perfect urban infill

and i believe this project has shown a real commitment to providing not just housing but good design and architecture as well. >> just addressing the cost of construction, 400 grove will generate approximately $10 million in labor economic benefit creating more than 125,000 person hours of work equivalent of keeping over 60 people occupied for a year. i believe that 400 grove is a necessary and welcome addition to the haze valley street scape and i urge you to commend this developer for the passion and commitment to the city and approve this project. >> thank you. >> i will call a couple more names. >> paul shaven and james nunan. >> good afternoon, thank you to all assembled for this important civic due diligence,

>> state your name for the record >> pauline shaver. >> for the following reasons, it is passed the rigorous review of the planning development. the depositor has showsen a haze valley resident to manage the project. ham beger who lives and works in the haze valley, he has personal and professional investments in what many in the city observe as one of the most authentic neighborhoods. haze valley. the architect is a leader in her field. she has what she proves in her probono work. and along with what she has done at the eagle side branch library as well as her private project and she understands community. and i understands the concerns of the individual, especially some of the concerns of transportation. we live in an urban environment which by nature is in constant

change, urban living rightfully focuses on the needs of the many and sometimes that is the odds with the needs of the few. 400 grove will be an exciting addition to our community in haze valley. and with the bmr units it will provide home ownership opportunities to middle income housing. >> thank you. >> hello, good afternoon, high name is chris dew ize and i am a resident of the haze valley area, i come here on behalf of myself, and i have a background in urban planning, and i got a masters in urban planning on infill, projects and whatnot. so i have some idea about what is going on here to enveloped some weight to my approval of the project itself. currently i am an attorney, but i do kind of keep my eye on

local projects and this is one of them. basically, i approve of the fact that they should get both of their variances and the cup simply put, the number one, and you have heard it before through everybody else. san francisco needs market rate housing and this will add to that. and number two, this is increasing the density and the vitality of the area. right now, as you see, it is just a vacant lot and when you put another 34 units in here, you are going to increase foot traffic in the area as well as the local businesses will flourish a little bit more just because of the residents that are already there because of project. >> it is consistent with the octavia plan which took forever to get through this body and pop in on commissions like this over the past eight years or so, and now that it is going, we should continue the sentiment of it and this

project embodies that feel and that spirit of that plan. also, to the building itself, it is a beautiful addition to the neighborhood. one look at it, you could see that it is tweaks a little bit of the old tried and true san francisco design and adds a new flare to it, which obviously increases more vitality and it is a positive addition to the urban fabric. so it is basically i approve of it and i think that you should approve of the variances as well as the cuv. thank you. >> my name is (inaudible) and i fully support 400 grove. as a professional and advocate of creative successful communities, through good

design, i believe that the 400 grove put it and enhance and live in the important section, and acts as a gateway which is received the marks as important feature of the market and octavia plan. the project will continue and the street scape improvements will be taking place in other areas. especially in the long grove and goff. strengthen the street scape experience and integrating new street furniture, and seating, and bike racks, and the street (inaudible) from what i understand are consistent with what is already planted along goff and grove and will continue to tie that area together and it is also going to be from what i understand, a sidewalk, which will help with the storm water requirements that the city suggest is

important. >> and the widening of the sidewalk, activating the corner and the traffic calming measure is also something that i believe is what is really needed in the local area. and i think that over all. (inaudible) attribute for the area and make it safer community. >> thank you. >> thank you. >> is there any further public comment on this item? >> seeing none, public comment is closed. commissioner, antonini? >> thank you, i think that this is a very good project. and i am very supportive. i have only a few concerns. the first has to do with the foliage in the interior courtyard that i think opens to the south and i am not sure of the actual orientation, but we have a lot of wind in