In 2025, the City of San Francisco is trying to incentivize expanded “housing affordability and availability” by upzoning tens of thousands of parcels across the northern and western areas of the city.
In 1988, the City of San Francisco tried to incentivize affordable housing for artists with an ordinance easing loft conversion and construction of live/work spaces in the Mission District, Potrero Hill, and South of Market.
The program wasn’t used much at first. In 1993, just 38 live/work units were constructed. But some early designs constructed in South of Market alleys were inventive and were usually true live/work spaces for creatives.
Architect Donald MacDonald played with vernacular housing forms by skewing and expanding gables and the city’s quintessential bay windows.
In 1996, Levy Art + Architecture created a loft unit building with an ambiguated facade of cubic forms on South Park street where Georgian townhouses had stood before the 1906 earthquake and fire.
A New Modernism was exemplified by the Corson-Heinser live/work building (1992) at 25 Zoe Street, an award-winning creation designed by Tanner Leddy Maytum Stacy for a husband and wife with separate artistic practices.
Stanley Saitowitz also led a return to earlier Modernist principles with his design of 1022 Natoma Street in 1992 and the adjoining 1028 Natoma Street in 2005. This “industrial chic” is now strongly associated with residential South of Market architecture and has spread to other parts of the city, executed with various levels of success.
By the end of the 1990s, the majority of the Yerba Buena Center redevelopment plan had been completed with open park space, modern hotels, and attractive museums like the significant Postmodern SFMOMA building by architect Mario Botta.
In the 1990s, gritty South of Market rapidly gentrified with a new name: SOMA. In a surging national economy, the dot-com boom birthed numerous tech firm start-ups which were drawn to the adaptable warehouses South of Market and the fashionable Yerba Buena Center. Moscone Convention Center hosted internationally anticipated conferences like Macworld, where Steve Jobs would unveil the latest Apple product. From 38 live/work projects completed in all of 1993, there were 2,800 lofts pending or approved for construction by the Planning Department in 1998 alone.
“While intended to support the artistic and bohemian culture of San Francisco,” notes the San Francisco Modern & Postmodern Context Statement by Page and Turnbull, “the ordinance fairly quickly became used as a loophole for developers to build dense complexes on more affordable land and take exemptions from various city taxes, fees, and parking and affordable housing requirements.”
The program’s fee exemptions lost the city at least $8 million without doing much for the arts community for which it was intended. At average purchase prices more than 30% higher than non-live/work housing, the lofts were unaffordable to most artists. A city analysis in the early 2000s admitted the well-intended ordinance resulted in a “failure of live/work projects to be used either as artist work spaces or, in some instances, as residences at all.”
By 2002, the city admitted defeat and the live/work ordinance was repealed. But the trend had been set. The dot-com crash and subprime mortgage crisis only slightly slowed South of Market’s transition to SOMA. The new San Francisco Giants ballpark and the emergence of the Mission Bay neighborhood accelerated denser developments on the east side of the neighborhood with a forest of soaring office and high-end condominium structures, including the city’s new tallest building, Salesforce Tower.
Live/work-style buildings continued to be constructed, but without any implied connection to creative occupants or studio space inside. Stanley Saitowitz’s 2007 building at 1234 Howard Street, which featured an even more refined minimalism and multi-bedroom units, was praised by Arch Daily for “providing more privacy to accommodate family living” in a “loft-saturated housing environment.”
Each successive tech boom has pushed South of Market farther from its pre-21st century light-industrial character. Rather than single-lot loft conversions, large new developments like the L Seven Luxury apartments on Harrison Street and the projected $1 billion 5M mega-project typify the city’s recent planning approach to SOMA.
But just as the Filipino community has been able to hold on in the central blocks of South of Market, LGBTQ+ subcultures and spaces integral to the neighborhood’s post World War II character continue to survive and even thrive on the western edge of the neighborhood.
We will delve more deeply across this topic in this last week of South of Market month.
Sources
“1234 Howard Street/Stanley Saitowitz| Natoma Architects,” Arch Daily, September 11, 2009.
Robert Selna, “How S.F.’s live-work development boom began,” San Francisco Chronicle, August 18, 2008.
San Francisco Modern & Postmodern Architectural Styles (1960–2000), San Francisco Planning Department, prepared by Page & Turnbull, 2024.
In October 2025 SF Heritage is spotlighting the South of Market for its Heritage in the Neighborhoods program.
