Not The Haight Street Your Hippie Parents Loved

Ground zero for Haight Street in San Francisco isn’t necessarily the corner of Haight and Ashbury. It’s the corner of Haight and Stanyan, where Haight ends and dumps into Golden Gate Park. This is the true ground zero for the gentrification wars, where hipsters congregate to talk up their latest Amoeba acquisitions and holdout hippies whisper ‘greenbuds’ or ‘nuggets’ to entice passers-by into an acquisition.

And after a years-long battle, this is also the site of a newly-approved 62-unit condo project with a Whole Foods at the ground level. Now it’s just a question of whether the whisperers will be pushed deeper into the park, or they will hold their turf. One thing is certain: a cure for the munchies will certainly cost more now.

The San Francisco Planning Commission unanimously approved a long-contentious plan to build a Whole Foods and 62 units of housing at the corner of Haight and Stanyon streets.

The unanimous vote allows the builder Mark Brennan to knock down the former 26,300 square foot Cala Foods and replace it with a four-story 115,000 square foot structure with a 25,000 square foot Whole Foods, 81,000 square feet of housing, and a 174-space underground garage.

There would be 26 studio units, 20 one-bedroom units, 15 two-bedroom units, and one three-bedroom unit.

The 34,000-square-foot project site is located on the northeast corner of the intersection of Haight and Stanyan streets, on the block also bound by Page Street to the north and Shrader Street to the east in San Francisco’s Haight Ashbury neighborhood.

Project planner Jonas Ionin said the design will go through further revisions aimed at breaking up the horizontal plane along Haight Street.

Christiani Johnson, which specializes in housing over grocery projects, is the architect on the project.