What is the future of housing in the Bay Area?

San Francisco’s streets are lined with some of the most beautiful historic homes—”painted ladies” more than a century old. Building infill housing within this context means harmonizing with neighborhood density patterns to address housing shortages and honoring historic design to create a contemporary architecture. 

Our Washington Street scheme brings two buildings into dialogue on a single parcel. On one side of the property, the renovation of a Queen Anne Victorian structure, refashions the interior into two units while maintaining the design integrity of the exterior envelope. While that building was deemed a Class A historic resource, the second was a nondescript, low-rise commercial property. Our design replaces it with a new four-story residential building featuring two three-bedroom units and a roof deck.

A shared green space, or mews, runs between Washington Street’s two structures. It is a place for neighborhood gossip, herb gardens, and pedaling tricycles. Linking the public and domestic realms, outdoor spaces are an integral part of the urban fabric ensuring that a residential project has a life tied to a wider community. “The language of sidewalks, pathways, and courtyards in our projects are the continuity of the city into the site and vice versa,” says architect and principal Emily Gosack. 

“The problem of housing affordability is a problem of scarcity,” says Jensen. “The huge deficit of housing stock cannot be solved by tinkering around the edges with small projects.” To think bigger is to move beyond individual lots and neighborhoods and design at the scale of infrastructure. The Green Line, our visionary design developed for the AIASF Housing + San Francisco 2050 Design Competition, imagines dozens of slender apartment towers integrated with transit stretching down Geary Boulevard from downtown to Ocean Beach. Advocating for a more mobile and healthier city, the linear proposal also includes acres of green space, solar energy generation, and rapid bus and bike lanes.

“Our Geary 2050 proposal suggests approaching housing like other infrastructure, with significant and bold proposals that have an optimistic view of the future,” he notes. “This vision will require not only reexamination of traditional building practices, but also a rethinking of approval processes that add time and cost to infrastructure projects of all kinds.”