Coach Mark Torres, right, Street Soccer USA East Cut Team coach, practices with soccer team members at The Crossing in San Francisco’s East Cut neighborhood. The area still has empty office buildings, but families are moving into the downtown neighborhood.
Lea Suzuki/S.F. Chronicle
Patrons play pickleball at The Crossing at East Cut. The community gathering area has become popular with residents in the downtown neighborhood.
Minh Connors/For the S.F. Chronicle
As a kid and young adult Saniko Togafau spent time in no shortage of San Francisco neighborhoods. She started life in the Excelsior and her family bounced between the Bayview, Visitacion Valley and Potrero Hill. She moved to Antioch with her three sons for a while and spent 20 years working for United Playaz, the South of Market anti-violence and youth education nonprofit.
Two weeks ago Togafau moved her family into one of the few neighborhood that hadn’t been on her radar: downtown’s East Cut.
“I’ve stayed in every neighborhood you could think of,” she said. “But I never thought I would live downtown.”
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Togafau’s family is one of 184 households who will be moving over the next few months into Lark Landing, a 17-story affordable housing complex overlooking The Crossing, the East Cut social hub with its basketball and pickleball courts, playground, food and cocktail kiosks, the massive screen where residents gather to watch movies and sporting events.
From her fifth floor apartment, Togafau looks north over the bustling park. Already she and her three school age children have become regulars there.
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“My kids are so stoked — they wake up and are like, ‘Can we go downstairs to the Crossing?’ and I’m like, ‘How about you guys maybe brush your teeth first?’” she said. “After school they rush home so they can hang out at the Crossing.”
Saniko Togafau, right, plays cornhole with her son Chase Vea, 11, at The Crossing in the East Cut. They are some of the first residents to move into Lark Landing, a low-income housing development in the East Cut neighborhood.
Minh Connors/For the S.F. Chronicle
Derided by some as a real estate industry-invented neighborhood full of half-empty office towers and rarely occupied multi-million-dollar condos, the East Cut has quietly emerged, along with Treasure Island, as one of San Francisco’s fastest-changing neighborhoods. It’s a place where apartments, some vacant since the pandemic, are getting backfilled at by highly-paid AI workers at $10,000 rents even as the only new housing under construction is subsidized affordable projects.
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While families have just started moving into the Lark Landing building, directly to the west is another newly opened affordable complex: Phil Chin Commons, 151-unit affordable senior apartments built by Chinatown Community Development Center.
Together, 332 units of housing will bring upwards of 800 new residents into the downtown neighborhood boundaried by Market to Harrison streets to the north and south and Second to Steuart streets to the west and east. It represents the first new housing in the East Cut since early in the pandemic when two new deluxe condos buildings debuted: the twisty white Mira building and One Steuart Lane, overlooking the Embarcadero on the waterfront.
While East Cut will never have the Haight’s kaleidoscope of Victorians or Noe Valley’s nestled village vibe, neighborhood boosters say the new developments are proof that it is becoming a modern San Francisco twist on a high-density neighborhood where low-income families can share space with well-to-do condo owners. There are now more than 9,000 homes in the East Cut, ranging from $10 million penthouses to studios for the formerly homeless earning 15% of area median income.
“I know people who live in million condos in the Infinity building and I live in affordable housing,” said Patrick Kelly, a volunteer pickleball coordinator at The Crossing who lives at nearby Natalie Gubb Commons. “We would never know each other were it not for (The Crossing) and the pickleball courts.”
Chase Vea, 11, plays cornhole at The Crossing in the East Cut. His mother said he and his siblings can’t wait to go to community gathering area once they’re home from school.
Minh Connors/For the S.F. Chronicle
Majid Qasin moved into the Philip Chin building in February. After a lifetime of working in air conditioning repair and installation, the 76-year-old became homeless a few years ago after a long illness put him out of work.
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He said living in the East Cut feels a world away from his previous place in a residential hotel at Sixth and Howard. He loves the clean and quiet streets.
“You go outside the door at 10 or 11 at night, you don’t have to worry about the drama, the defecating on the sidewalk — by the dogs or the individuals,” Qasin said. “This neighborhood is great. When you call the cops they come immediately.”
Still, residents say the neighborhood continues to lack some of the basics that most districts take for advantage: mom and pop retail and affordable groceries. While East Cut has coffee chains like Philz and Bluestone and formula salad spots like Sweet Greens, those places go dark in the afternoon and on weekends when office workers disperse.
But relief is on its way, thanks to Mercy Housing and Chinatown CDC, which has been agressively recruiting small businesses for the five retail sports in the new buildings. The Lark Landing building is poised to get its first ever full-service bookstore, Book Castle, which had a store on Cortland Street in Bernal Heights during the pandemic. And two other buzzy family-owned local food businesses are slated to open: the Mexican bakery Amidulci, known for its pop-ups and baking classes, and the first brick-and-mortar spot from Jennifer Huang, an Indonesian chef known for savory beef rendang and 1,000-layer cakes.
“There are more and more residents in East Cut but most of the businesses still cater to office workers,” said Julia Katz, who heads up leasing for Mercy Housing. “People are interested in affordable food, places that are family friendly, neighborhood shops that help create the fabric of a residential neighborhood. A lot of it is about affordability and character building.”
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Andrew Robinson, executive director of the East Cut Community Benefits District, said his organization is pushing to make sure an affordable grocery store is part of the next phase of development.
“We fail as a neighborhood if we are creating vertical suburbia,” said Robinson, whose organization operates both The Crossing and Salesforce Park atop the Transbay Transit Center. “We fail if you have to leave this neighborhood and go to the Mission or North Beach to have a city experience.”
Saniko Togafau, left, loses a game of Jenga against her son Chase Vea, 11, at The Crossing in the East Cut.
Minh Connors/For the S.F. Chronicle
The Architects of the two new affordable buildings worked together to create synergy and foster community, according to Mithun Managing Partner Anne Torney, who oversaw the design of the Philip Chin complex. Both buildings are C-shaped with courtyards that look out onto a public paseo that connects Folsom Street to The Crossing. The senior building has a garden seating area on the paseo where the retirees will be able to see the children running around in the play area of the pre-school that is slated to open in the Lark building.
The townhomes in the Philip Chin building have stoops with views of the park and there is a sixth-floor patio looking out at the playground. With nearby buildings designed by superstar architects like Jeannie Gang and Rem Koolhaas’ Office for Metropolitan Architecture, the standards in the East Cut are perhaps higher than some other parts of the city, Torney said.
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“The vision is you can’t tell by walking around the city who lives where just by the architecture of the buildings,” Torney said.
In many ways the pandemic hit the East Cut harder than other parts of San Francisco. Most of the neighborhood’s 80,000 workers vanished. Residents, drawn to the area by convenience to work, fled. The development of market rate housing also came to a halt. Residents complained that the vacuum left by what had been a downtown bustle was filled by a number of vagrants and encampments. The streets were eerily quiet and restaurants shuttered in the wake of COVID.
“All these offices are still empty,” said Milan Jezdimirovic, a real estate agent who specializes in the East Cut and Mission Bay condo sales and rentals. “We still need more people.”
Eric Passetti, who owns more than a half dozen bars and restaurants in East Cut or nearby, had plenty of people advising him that downtown San Francisco was not coming back and that he redirect his attention elsewhere.
“Coming out of COVID when people were cautioning me that downtown was dead and people were never going back to the office, the only thing that gave me the resolve to keep going was the fact that the infrastructure was all there,” he said, referencing the $2 billion Salesforce Transit Center and Park, the new ferry lines off the Embarcadero and nearby BART and Muni stops. “No matter how bad things got I figured they would need to figure out what to do with all these buildings and all this transit. That was my bet.”
It’s paid off. While the organic happy hour and lunch rush that fueled business before the pandemic is still way down, revenue from corporate events and private parties has made up for it.
Francesca Gnuva, Kelly Zheng and Chelsea Chen, all from San Francisco, gather for a group hug at the Mili Wine Bar in the East Cut.
Lea Suzuki/S.F. Chronicle
Other small business owners made similar wagers. In 2023 longtime Silicon Valley engineer Shubhra Sarkar opened the wine bar Mili in the Mira building, where she lived, because she felt that East Cut lacked a casual gathering spot.
“We were all isolated and we realized human beings can’t live alone,” she said. “You need a human connection.”
Mili Wine Bar Manager John Jasso said business has picked up after a dismal 2024, but he said the neighborhood is transient and he is already hearing from regulars who are moving because their rent has been “jacked up.” He said the younger after-work crowd tends to leave after one or two drinks to meet friends in the Marina or Polk Street, while the older crowd might stick around.
Condo prices are still 10% to 15% below pre-pandemic levels, according to Jezdimirovic and partner Dunja Green, but the artificial intelligence boom is fueling stiff competition for luxury rentals.
Ilais Vea, 4, is pushed around in a cart by his mother Saniko Togafau at The Crossing in the East Cut.
Minh Connors/For the S.F. Chronicle
East Cut condo rentals are averaging nearly $6,000 a month and a three bedroom penthouse at 401 Harrison leased in May for $21,000. Green and Jezdimirovic recently listed a unit for rent on the 27th floor of Mira for $9,500 a month. They got six offers and the highest bidder, an AI executive relocating from Minnesota, offered an extra $1,000 a month. Green said “all the applicants were super high profile — people who could afford to buy half the building.”
“They didn’t even look at the kitchen — they don’t have time for cooking,” Green said. “They wanted a nice new building with great views.”
And while market rate projects are still on hold, for now, it’s likely that the East Cut’s next buildings will also be affordable — Mercy Housing has another building slated for the northern end of what is now The Crossing.
Meanwhile, the neighborhood will continue to evolve. Work is set to start on East Cut Park, a $42 million four-block public space under and around the Fremont Street I-80 freeway off-ramps.
Pedestrians walk on Folsom Street past Lark Landing, building in background center, and Phil Chin Commons, where affordable apartments are bringing in more than just office workers to the East Cut.
Lea Suzuki/S.F. Chronicle
And though the Mercy building probably won’t break ground for three years, the developer is already looking for an affordable grocer to occupy a 4,200 square foot space. Right now the only market in the East Cut is Woodlands on Folsom Street, which Kelly describes as “double the cost of Whole Foods, plus a dollar.”
Still, Togafau said the convenience of living in East Cut makes up for the lack of convenient groceries. Her older son is going to play football at Junipero Serra High School in San Mateo next year and will be able to take Caltrain to get to school. Her younger two sons attend school in the Bayview and will be able to take Muni.
“Living in the heart of the city makes it all easier,” she said. “I always wanted to take my kids to Pier 39. I always wanted to take my kids to the ballpark. There are a lot of places you want to take your kids, but when you don’t live downtown, you don’t want to come downtown.”