Price for Mount Olympus Site and Plans Slashed

Mar 27, 2023

As we outlined last year:

The assembled site and plans for a proposed 10-unit development to rise on the northwest corner of 17th and Roosevelt, below the summit of San Francisco's Mount Olympus on the southern border of Ashbury Heights, are now on the market with a $7.495 million price tag.

In the works since 2014, when Dawson & Clinton acquired the existing single-family home at 271 Upper Terrace, which sits atop the site, along with the undeveloped lot at 4500 17th Street and the existing duplex at 301-303 Upper Terrace for a little over $4 million combined, the development as proposed, which was dubbed the Mount Olympus project, would yield five modern duplexes, with the individual units ranging in size from 1,555 to 4,043 square feet and averaging 2,897 square feet apiece.

As we reported back at the end of 2018, a Preliminary Mitigated Negative Declaration for the development, which obviates the need for a detailed environmental impact report, has been signed and issued for the project which is now "in the final stages of approval" and being positioned as "ready for a savvy developer…who is ready to make this landmark opportunity a reality."

If the plans for the proposed Mount Olympus development are approved and the ground is broken, the project team had been estimating that it would take around 37 months to complete, including the required excavation of the existing hillside and removal of about 13,640 cubic yards of soil, as we outlined a few years ago.

With "a savvy developer" having yet to emerge and the project still "in the final stages of approval," the "offering price" for the site has just been dropped to $2.595 million and offers slated to be reviewed next week. We’ll keep you posted and plugged-in.

This is an oasis of green and should be preserved as such. As the price is lowered it would be nice to see deep pocketed SF resident(s) purchase the site and keep it as permanent open space. With land valuations sharply declining across SF there is a golden opportunity to have the City work with well-off civic minded residents (like Benioff) to purchase/preserve these few remaining pockets of undeveloped open space.

I can't tell if you are calling this an oasis sarcastically or not

It's what passes for one in SF so a bit of sarcasm yes, but pockets of green like this are a welcome respite from the wall-to-wall development that overs much of SF.

Planting a huge number of sidewalk trees and investing in sidewalk gardens would go a long way, as well. An organization like Friends of the Urban Forest really should be an official city org.

I never get how people decide that rich people should buy open space and keep it undeveloped so that people who didn't spend a dime on it can enjoy it. If green space is so important to you, you buy it and do what you want with it.

Have no way of knowing for sure, but I suspect that unlike you, Marc Benioff doesn't have a framed photo of Ayn Rand mounted on his bedroom wall above his headboard.

Sounds like you should support upzoning our residential neighborhoods in order to prevent growth from consuming greenspace then, right?

They are also selling off the Upper Terrace houses separately for $1.2m and $1.4. Not sure how that would work if someone bought just one of the UT houses. But basically they are giving the 17th and Roosevelt lot away.

I was under the impression that Dawson & Clinton were the best example of a "savvy developer" that could actually pull a project like this, since they could presumably handle the GC responsibilities ‘in house’.

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