With Orchard Supply Hardware having been controversially denied their bid to convert the Pacific Sales building at 975 Bryant Street into a 33,000 square foot OSH with a nursery on its roof, plans to raze the existing building and develop over 180 new homes on the Showplace Square site were drafted, as we first reported at the time.

The refined designs for the proposed development, which have been drafted by Kwan Henmi, calls for a five-story building, with 185 apartments and a basement garage for 135 cars and 3,000 square feet of ground floor retail space, to rise up to 48 feet in height across the Bryant Street site, between Langton and Kate Streets.

The paperwork to secure the building permit for the 975 Bryant Street project has now been filed. And the plans for the development have just been deemed eligible for a streamlined environmental review as the project falls with the boundaries of San Francisco’s approved Eastern Neighborhoods Area Plan.

With respect to any knee-jerk comments of the “why not higher?” ilk, keep in mind that the parcel is currently only zoned for development up to 48 feet in height.

In addition, the proposed project was designed to leverage “highly cost effective Type 5 construction,” which is limited to four stories of wood framing over a concrete podium and was seen as a selling point, not a flaw, when the property quietly changed hands for $27.5 million in mid-2015.

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