OMA Completes Its First All-Affordable US Housing Block in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury
OMA, the Rotterdam-founded architecture firm, has completed its first 100 per cent affordable housing complex in the United States — a 160-home apartment block at 730 Stanyan Street in San Francisco, California, near Golden Gate Park and the Haight-Ashbury neighbourhood. Dezeen
The New York office of OMA and local practice YA Studio designed the eight-storey building, which was developed for two non-profit housing organisations: the Chinatown Community Development Center (CNDC) and the Tenderloin Neighborhood Development Corporation (TNDC). The homes are earmarked for low-income residents, including families and formerly unhoused families. OMA
OMA partner Jason Long led the design. He and YA Studio were selected for the project on 9 June 2020, according to OMA's own announcement. OMA
The building rises to eight storeys at its central block, with a lighter facade colouration. Two four-storey envelopes bookend the structure on either side, stepping down to better match the scale of the surrounding neighbourhood, where Victorian townhomes predominate.
The facade is clad in a series of modular GFRC — glass-fibre reinforced concrete — panels shaped into what the architects describe as "wave" forms, echoing the rhythm of those nearby townhomes. The panels were fabricated at different lengths to span varying widths of the facade, with integrated windows and ventilation louvres built directly into each unit.
At ground level, three courtyards open the building to the street and to its neighbours. A deep U-shaped entrance courtyard faces Stanyan Street, while two square courtyards sit along the adjoining building line. Each courtyard was designed by San Francisco-based GLS Landscape Architecture.
Inside, the unit mix runs from studios to three-bedrooms: 35 studios, 43 one-bedrooms, 42 two-bedrooms, and 40 three-bedrooms, according to reporting by SF YIMBY. SF YIMBY The site spans approximately 38,000 square feet (about 3,500 square metres), and the building adds roughly 194,000 square feet (18,000 square metres) of affordable homes and amenities. OMA
For a firm best known for cultural landmarks — the CCTV Headquarters in Beijing, the Seattle Central Library, the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow — an all-affordable housing block in a residential San Francisco street is a departure. It also puts OMA's design machinery, from modular facade panels to courtyard planning, in service of a housing type where budgets are tight and every dollar is tracked by the non-profits that operate the building long after the architects leave.
San Francisco's affordable housing crisis has made sites like 730 Stanyan test cases for whether name-brand architecture can improve outcomes for low-income residents — or whether, as critics argue, the money spent on design polish might have housed more people in plainer buildings. The CNDC and TNDC, which will operate 730 Stanyan, have not publicly released figures on per-unit construction costs.
The building sits a short walk from the eastern edge of Golden Gate Park, in a neighbourhood whose Victorian streetscape has changed little in a century. Whether its wave-patterned concrete fits that context is a question for the people who will live behind it.
