Adopted back in 2005, the Rincon Hill Plan requires a minimum distance of 115 feet between new residential towers at their closest point. And the plan specifies that no exemptions may be made.
As such, in order to clear the way for the proposed tower to rise at 525 Harrison Street, the parcel upon which the Sound Factory Club currently sits 88-feet from the new residential tower at 45 Lansing, Planning is moving forward with legislative amendments to the Rincon Hill Plan, Planning Code, and Zoning Map for the parcel.
And with the legislative amendments slated to earn the Planning Commission’s endorsement this week along the project’s conditional approval, the proposed tower has been redesigned by Solomon Cordwell Buenz for Hines as newly rendered above, decreasing the tower’s bulk but increasing its total mass by raising its proposed height by five stories to 250-feet.
The redesigned tower includes 205 apartments, up from 179 as originally proposed, with 25 of the units designated as Below Market Rate units, and parking for 103 cars in automated stackers and 1,000 square feet of ground-floor commercial space along Harrison.
As the tower looked as previously proposed:
If approved with the revised design atop the page, a design which still doesn’t accommodate a new Bay Bridge off-ramp to San Francisco’s Transbay Transit Center, a ramp which AC Transit has deemed “critical” to reducing transit delays but would run through the podium of Hines’ development, construction will take approximately 21 months and is expected to begin as early as July 2016.