More than a decade after the 49ers left Candlestick Park, the city has unveiled new plans for Candlestick Point, with 7,200 new homes, but it seems questionable whether there will be much call for all of the office space in this plan.
Your San Francisco 49ers played their last game at Candlestick Park on December 23, 2013. Eight months later, the last event that ever happened there was a Paul McCartney concert where he played “Live and Let Die.” But San Francisco lived and let Candlestick Point die, despite a grand 2016 plan for a retail, performance, and residential project that never got off the ground.
“Right now what we have in the absence of Candlestick stadium, which has been torn down for years, is a big gaping hole in the middle of a community,” the district’s supervisor Shamann Walton said at a Tuesday Board of Supervisors meeting. “It is nothing but a pile of dirt. That has allowed for increased encampments and other nuisances to continue to plague the area.”
The board was talking Candlestick, because they were considering new redevelopment plans for Candlestick Point, as KPIX reports. As seen above, the plan is intertwined with the highly beleaguered and possibly contaminated Hunters Point Shipyard redevelopment project, moving as two plans with one master developer. But the Shipyard is project is delayed by some sticky legal problems over faked soil samples.
So that means the Candlestick Point project is likely moving forward first.
The new Candlestick plan the board was presented by SF’s Office of Community Investment and Infrastructure (OCII) on Tuesday proposes 7,200 new homes, 32% of them affordable housing. OCII executive director Thor Kaslofsky told the board, “Upon my hiring in 2022, the mayor, Supervisor Walton, the OCII commission, and the community said ‘Get Candlestick going.’ Since then, that’s been a major focus of mine.”
The board was not voting on the plan itself, but instead a time amendment on the project’s bond financing. Without an expanded timeline, the bond financing would expire soon.
But the plan is certainly a more exciting aspect than the bond financing, and the yellow triangle seen above is where the stadium used to be. Per KPIX. the new Candlestick plan “includes taller buildings, and a so-called ‘innovation district’ aimed at biotech and AI.” OCII officials also said the plan includes two million square feet of “office and R&D.”
But given San Francisco's dire housing shortage, and glut of unwanted office space, do we really need that two million square feet of office and R&D? We already got more than we can handle! Regardless, OCII staff said there would also be “entertainment uses” in there, but did not elaborate on what those would be.
Yet in true San Francisco Board of Supervisors fashion, they discussed the matter for more than two hours, and then delayed any vote until next week
Why? As Deputy City Attorney Brad Russi very vaguely explained, “The board has received written objections to the redevelopment plan amendments, and under state law, OCII must respond to those objections.”
So no vote on a new life for Candlestick Point until next week. But if the place has been desolate for 11 years, heck, what's another week?
Related: What Will Happen To Candlestick Park After 49ers Leave? [SFist]
Image: Office of Community Investment and Infrastructure