Hunters Point Shipyard transformation in home buyers' hands

Michael Brown sprays down the land at the Shipyard, the new development at Hunters Point in San Francisco. Michael Brown sprays down the land at the Shipyard, the new development at Hunters Point in San Francisco. Photo: Tim Hussin, Special To The Chronicle Photo: Tim Hussin, Special To The Chronicle Image 1 of / 20 Caption Close Hunters Point Shipyard transformation in home buyers' hands 1 / 20 Back to Gallery

Since 1997 Lennar Urban has been selling its vision of a revitalized Hunters Point Shipyard to everyone from Bayview district neighbors to union bosses to environmentalists.

Now the builder is ready to start selling to the one group that matters to its shareholders: home buyers.

With the wooden frames of 88 town houses and flats marching up the hillside off Innes Avenue, Lennar is putting the final touches on its "welcome center": a 3,500-square-foot industrial chic modular building with a fireplace, comfy seating and an expansive deck overlooking the bay.

While 88 homes is a modest number in a city with thousands of units under construction, it's important because it is the start of arguably the most ambitious real estate development plan in the city's history: a $7 billion, 750-acre project aimed at transforming an abandoned Navy complex into a neighborhood with 12,000 homes and millions of square feet of office and retail space.

At a time when the lack of affordable housing is among the city's most pressing political issues, Lennar says the Shipyard represents housing that, while still not cheap, is a good 30 percent less costly than the $1,100 per square foot developers are getting in areas like South of Market, the Mission and Hayes Valley.

Units will average in the low $600s per square foot, with flats averaging about $550,000 and town houses averaging just less than $700,000.

"You are getting the same finished product you are getting downtown at a price point many more San Franciscans can reach," said Alan Mark of the Mark Co., which is marketing the project.

The first 88 homes are broken into two clusters: Olympia, a 25-unit collection of town houses, and Merchant, a 63-flat building. Both open this year.

More in 2015

An additional 159 units will be available in 2015. The entire first phase of the Shipyard will have 1,400 units, 16 pocket parks and 25 acres of manicured parks and trails. The clusters of housing will feel like distinct neighborhoods, rather than a typical master-planned subdivision, said Sheryl McKibben, Lennar's vice president of sales and marketing.

"It's going to evolve like a city evolves and take on its own personality," McKibben said. "One building may have a hidden courtyard, another might have a rooftop deck. Some have fire pits at street level, some have them tucked into little alleyways."

Marketing the Shipyard has proved to be politically tricky for Lennar. When the developer unveiled its branding campaign in February, San Francisco Supervisor Malia Cohen objected that the developer had changed the name from Hunters Point Shipyard to simply the Shipyard. In a letter, Cohen said: "Your strategy of marketing these units as separate from the surrounding neighborhood fosters the perspective that the existing residents of Hunters Point are not intended to benefit from this development."

She suggested that the developer was looking to minimize association with a neighborhood that has struggled with poverty.

Mark says that the existing Bayview neighborhood, a traditional African American enclave with one of the highest rates of homeownership in the city, is in fact a primary selling point for the project.

"People like to move into an area that is up-and-coming but also a place where there is a great social fabric and history," Mark said.

Freddie Carter, a Bayview resident and construction superintendent with Obayashi Corp., said he doesn't mind the name change. Carter worked repairing boilers on some of the last ships stationed at Hunters Point and the memories are not great. "The jobs went away and we were left to stagnate," Carter said. "A lot of people started to migrate to the East Bay to be closer to jobs."

But as construction started in July, Carter found himself back at the shipyard as the first superintendent on the job. Carter said he hopes it might be a place his grandkids could call home.

"They could be living in a place that Grandpa built," he said. "This is going to be a great opportunity for the younger guys. ... The guys working on this job are making good wages - there is no reason why they couldn't qualify."

Trent Zhu, a real estate broker focused on the Bayview, said the neighborhood is seeing increasing traffic from buyers who have been priced out of neighborhoods like Bernal Heights and the Mission. While there are multiple offers on every property, prices are still averaging about $500,000, which is 25 percent below the highs reached before the market crashed in 2008. "The Bayview is the last neighborhood in San Francisco that is still well below its previous price point," he said. "It still has room to grow."

The opening of the sales office comes as Lennar has won final approval to build a 60,000-square-foot artists building with 130 studios, a gallery, kilns and spray rooms.

Space for artists

The studio building will provide work space for about 150 artists displaced from a collection of older buildings that will be demolished.

Hunters Point artist Karen Slater said Lennar and the city delivered on their promise to build studios for artists "who would otherwise have been displaced. It's really important for San Francisco and we are very excited about it," she said.

But while artists have work space in the new Shipyard, Slater said she is disappointed the plan did not include affordable housing set aside for artists.

"The new studios are great, but if nobody can afford to live anywhere close to San Francisco, it's going to be a problem," she said. "We are losing artists left and right. Of the artists who make a living making art, I can't imagine more than a handful could afford (the Shipyard)."