By Heather Knight : sfchronicle – excerpt
As San Francisco stares down a state mandate to build 82,000 new housing units within eight years, an 80-something retired architect has a great solution. It’s called Domicity.
Just a few blocks from Ocean Beach, in San Francisco’s sleepy, foggy Outer Sunset neighborhood, sits a little slice of Paris — or as close to it as one can get among the endless rows of single-family homes in varying shades of beige.
At 44th Avenue and Noriega Street sits Gus’s Community Market. Trees, picnic tables and green umbrellas primed for unlikely sunshine line the sidewalks alongside wooden stands brimming with colorful flowers, artichokes and melons.
Above the shop sit three stories of housing, giving the bustling market more customers and the city more desperately needed homes. All in all, the pleasant corner offers a touch of the European flair two supervisors want to see replicated in their districts, swaths of San Francisco that have not shouldered their weight in helping the city address its housing crisis.
Now, Supervisors Myrna Melgar and Joel Engardio — who represent District Seven’s West of Twin Peaks area and District Four’s Sunset neighborhood, respectively — are pushing their sometimes resistant constituents to support far more Gus-style buildings. And they’re teaming up to pass legislation that could help make it a reality…
One sign that west side seniors are coming around to Lew’s idea: George Wooding, a 67-year-old homeowner in District Seven and the president of the Midtown Terrace Home Owners Association, has long opposed plans to build more housing near him, but he’s grudgingly supportive of Lew.
“Times are changing,” Wooding conceded. “He’s way ahead of everybody else. He’s a visionary as opposed to somebody just trying to make money.”…(more)
Since Domicity as introduced to CSFN it appears that a few changes were added to the program. The designs are still a formula that involves mixed use 6 story buildings that may be customized for different purposes, and if memory serves, Lew plans to use lightweight wood products and avoid the need for heavier concrete and steel structures by limiting the buildings to six stories. There is now a nonprofit funding program based on the idea that a lot of senior homeowners want to downsize. Lew may be a visionary but his partners may rub some the wrong way.