By Kate Snyder
A plan to revamp a 107-year-old bus yard in San Francisco that also includes the construction of hundreds of apartments is underway.
The Potrero Yard Modernization Project is a proposal to turn Protero Yard – located at 2500 Mariposa Street – into a new modern facility with approximately 650,000 square feet of public transit use and up to 575 apartments located above the bus garage, according to information from the city. The development’s total anticipated square footage range is one to 1.3 million.
Last year, the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency board of directors voted to approve the city’s next step in moving the proposal forward, according to an announcement from the city. The SFMTA was given authority to execute the initial predevelopment agreement with the Potrero Neighborhood Collective, the project developer. The Potrero Neighborhood Collective team is led by Plenary Americas US Holdings, Inc., a public infrastructure investment and development firm. Design consultants on the project are IBI Group and Y.A. studio.
“Transit and housing should go together, whether that’s building dense housing on transit lines or recognizing opportunities like this to not only modernize a bus facility, but also how we think about building more housing while we do,” San Francisco Mayor London Breed said at the time of the board’s vote. “San Francisco is a dense city, and we have to be deliberate in how we approach solutions to our housing shortage.”
Potrero Yard was built in 1915 and sits on 4.4 acres bounded by Bryant, 17th, Hampshire and Mariposa streets. The two-story structure originally operated as a streetcar facility housing 100 streetcars and has since been expanded to hold 138 40-foot and 60-foot trolley buses.
According to the project’s website, the new facility would be designed to fit in with the surrounding neighborhood by breaking up the massing and introducing active uses where possible along the street frontages. The facility would have three main levels up to 75 feet in height from the corner of Mariposa and Bryant streets used for bus maintenance and storage. The new modern yard would be able to store 213 buses, which is an approximately 50 percent increase in capacity. In addition, the facility’s features would include LEED Gold certification, seismic standard construction, infrastructure for battery-electric buses, having a centralized location for street operations and first responders and ground floor active uses on Bryant and possibly 17th streets.
Other enhancements include improving working environments for SFMTA frontline operations and maintenance staff as well as providing space and operational flow for bus maintenance, parking and circulation of the bus fleet.
Along with the new facility, the proposal includes residential units built on seven additional floors above the bus development, which would bring the property’s total height of up to 150 feet at the tallest point. Plans call for about half of the residential units to be reserved for low-income seniors, families and single-occupant households earning 80 percent or below of the area median income.The remaining units will be available as moderate-income housing for households earning between 80 percent and 120 percent of the AMI.
The Potrero Yard Modernization Project is currently in early design stages, and officials are further developing the design of architectural and commercial elements such as massing and housing unit count and unit mix. Finalizing materials selection, lighting and curated art are ongoing.
