Update: The Planning Commission approved the tower on a 6-1 vote laste last night.

The condo tower proposed for 75 Howard St. barely registers in terms of size: Its 133 units aren’t even in the top 25 in the San Francisco Planning Department’s housing development pipeline.

But what matters in real estate is location, not size. And 75 Howard St. happens to be across the Embarcadero from the third rail of San Francisco land use politics: the waterfront.

“There is a lot of passion around 75 Howard St. because even if it’s not directly on the waterfront, it’s close enough to impact the urban design along the waterfront,” said Planning Commissioner Dennis Richards, who has been trying to broker a compromise on the project.

The Planning Commission is scheduled to vote Thursday on the 220-foot, 20-story structure that would replace a 1976-vintage 550-car garage at the foot of Howard Street. The project has riled the No Wall on the Waterfront coalition that successfully torpedoed the proposed 8 Washington St. condominium project in 2013 and successfully pushed Proposition B, legislation that gives city voters a say on port land projects that exceed current height limits.

Already, blowback from residents and anti-development forces has pushed developer Paramount Group to scale back the project dramatically. In May, Paramount announced it would cut the tower to 220 feet from 290, which in itself was a reduction from the original proposed height of 348 feet.

The new proposal is 10 percent — 20 feet — higher than the 200 feet current zoning allows, which is allowed under code as long as there isn’t an adverse impact on neighboring properties.

“Paramount is proposing to remove an unattractive 550-space, eight-story parking garage and replace it with a residential building at a height the city says is appropriate for this location,” project spokesman Alex Clemens said.

The developer proposes to pay just under $9.7 million for affordable housing to the Mayor’s Office of Housing, as required under city law. The taller project that was scrapped had an affordable-housing commitment of about $20 million.

Critics such as John Eberling, executive director of the affordable housing owner TODCO, said the project’s commitment to affordable housing is insufficient and that it doesn’t do anything to mitigate the shadows it will cast on Rincon Park.

Clemens said the developer had explored bankrolling a 6,000-square-foot green space on a triangular parcel the Department of Public Works owns across the street from 75 Howard St., but those talks didn’t advance beyond the preliminary stages.

“If the city would like to build a park there, we would be eager to participate in helping to fund the building of a park there,” said Clemens.

In an era when affordable-housing activists are pushing a minimum of 33 percent affordable units — in keeping with 2014’s nonbinding Proposition K — Eberling argues that just because the tower is an “as of right” development in compliance with zoning and affordable housing laws doesn’t mean the city should rubber-stamp it.

“There is a series of ‘as of right,’ uber-luxury residential towers coming forward,” he said. “We are going to be against them all. One after another. The bare minimum is not enough.”

Clemens argues that Paramount is “playing by the rules the city allows us to play by.”

But after getting a taste of victory with 8 Washington and Prop. B, the No Wall on the Waterfront forces are not about to back down from a fight, said Jon Golinger, who led those campaigns.

“We are not saying don’t build, we are saying not that tall,” he said. “If they were to reduce the building to the height of the garage, that would be a different story.”

J.K. Dineen is a San Francisco Chronicle Staff Writer. E-mail: jdineen@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @sfjkdineen