Historic San Francisco earthquake shack to be demolished

If you’ve spent enough time in San Francisco, you’ve likely seen a few of these century-old bungalows. They’re small, oblong structures, shaped like boxcars. Shabby and short, they stick out among the rows of ornate Edwardian homes and two-story dwellings that line the city’s residential streets.

These are earthquake cottages, or earthquake shacks. They were constructed 120 years ago, after the 1906 earthquake and fires leveled most of San Francisco, leaving 225,000 residents without homes. To meet the sudden need for housing, the city, with the help of the army, built 5,600 of these tiny, 250-square-foot homes in city parks. At one point, 16,000 people lived in earthquake cottages.

After the city rebuilt, some opted to turn their cottages into permanent homes. Some of them, using horses and carts, lugged the structures from parks to vacant lots. Others broke down their cottages, carrying them piece by piece. In total, more than 5,300 earthquake shacks were repurposed as full-time homes.

Today, only a handful of those structures remain. Fewer than 50 earthquake cottages are left in San Francisco.

Now, another earthquake cottage is set to soon bite the dust. R Group, a local developer, has received approval from the city to demolish 107 Franconia St. in Bernal Heights. In its place, the developer plans to build a three-story structure, including a single-family home and an accessory dwelling unit.

It will be the latest in a slow trickle of earthquake cottage demolitions.

In 2025, a developer named Benjamin Steiner unceremoniously demolished two earthquake cottages in Noe Valley without a permit. The city had designated those structures, at 369 Valley St., as historic, and Steiner’s building permit required him to leave them intact. After the impromptu demolition, the city’s planning department ordered Steiner to rebuild the two shacks from their rubble and threatened him with a $500,000 fine. According to Daniel Sider, SF Planning’s chief of staff, the department is continuing to “work with the developer, historic preservation consultants, and our attorneys” involved in the project.

FILE: View northeast across Dolores Park/Mission High School earthquake shacks in 1907. (opensfhistory/wnp14.0615)

There are no such hurdles for R Group with 107 Franconia St. The planned demolition is fully above board. The city does not consider the cottage to be historic, Sider said in an email to SFGATE.

“While there is technically an earthquake shack here, it is sandwiched between two later additions – one at the front of the property and one at the rear,” Sider wrote. “In other words, this shack has been so heavily altered over the years that it retains none of the integrity that’s required to make it a historic resource.”

According to the planning department’s historic report on the building, its most significant alteration is a large addition to its front. That addition, which dates back to 1911, makes the cottage “no longer clearly legible as an earthquake shack, thus compromising its tangible association to the 1906 Earthquake and Fire,” the report explains.

Many of the city’s earthquake cottages were in Precita Park and eventually were moved to Bernal Heights. Bernal Heights had “solid bedrock” and an “abundance of vacant and inexpensive properties,” making it an ideal landing place for the homes, per 107 Franconia’s historic resource report. The street was once home to a row of three earthquake shacks, but only the home at 107 Franconia remains. (The other two were demolished in the 1990s.)

R Group purchased the cottage for $885,000 in 2022, according to Zillow records, and first proposed to redevelop it into a three-story home in 2024. Last month’s building permit, first reported by SF YIMBY, marks another step toward the cottage’s demolition.

The proposed home, designed by architecture firm Winder Gibson, would be 31 feet high and 81 feet deep.

SFGATE reached out to R Group for comment on the development but did not receive a response in time for publication.

Tags: