Plans for 21-story SoMa Hotel Shrink by Nearly 200 Rooms
Plans for 21-story SoMa Hotel Shrink by Nearly 200 Rooms
San Francisco Business Times
03/23/18
Plans for 21-story SoMa Hotel Shrink by Nearly 200 Rooms
By Katie Burke
The developer of a proposed 21-story SoMa hotel will cut seven stories and nearly 200 rooms from its original plan.
Initially slated to include 480 rooms, Bethesda, Md.-based developer Englewood LLC has scaled back its plans for 350 Second St. after city planners told it to dial back the original design. The updated plans to transform the Central SoMa parking lot include 294 rooms, an underground parking garage and more than 3,000 square feet of restaurant and bar space.
The original design drawn up by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill was caught in the crossfire between the city’s Central SoMa Plan and neighboring condo owners, who opposed its 200-foot height. The revised design is in line with their preference for no neighboring buildings to be higher than 130 feet.
Englewood President Ken Finkelstein said the revised plans will result in a smaller project, but wouldn’t have any impact on which hotel flag it will choose to operate the property.
“We’re not intending for this to be a Waldorf Astoria or a super luxury property like that,” he said. “This is also not meant to be a super economy property either. We haven’t fully come to a conclusion as to what type of operator, but we’ll land somewhere in the middle.”
Finkelstein added that the developer isn’t counting on breaking ground this year since it is still plowing through the city’s arduous entitlement process. A start date in 2019 is a possibility, however, depending on when the project is able to land before the planning commission for a second time.
Englewood’s hotel proposal is one of many included on San Francisco’s list of impending developments.
Last year, California set a record by opening more than 10,790 hotel rooms, according to a recent Atlas Hospitality Group report, breaking a record previously set in 2008. In the Bay Area, that included the delivery of 290 rooms between the debuts of both the Hotel Via and Proper Hotel. This year, another 670 rooms among four hotels are expected to open, with the largest to come from the 230-room Hyatt Place under construction at 701 Third St.
There are also more projects in the works: Atlas reports that San Francisco County has 38 hotels with 5,930 rooms in the planning phase, a 46 percent increase over 2016. Of those proposed projects, about 2,945 rooms are slated for the SoMa area.
