The Board of” Supes Tuesday continued the hearing on an illegal conversion of four rental units into a single mansion in North Beach so the Department of Building Inspection could examine the place. The appeal will now be heard April 7.
But before the board can vote to continue an appeal hearing, public comment is required—and a speaker who showed up to oppose the delay showed the board this article.
From sfgate:
Behind a purposefully deceptive facade, 3199 Jackson St. is a private compound. This historic property was originally built as an apartment complex in 1905. Today, it is a private residence and single-family estate. The chance to be the next owner? It comes with a $32 million price tag.
According to listing agent Max Armour, 3199 Jackson St. could be easily mistaken for the historic seven-unit building it once was, as the exterior facade has been deliberately maintained to look just as it did over a century ago. But make no mistake: This 26,260-square-foot estate is now owned by one family. The award-winning firm of Butler Armsden Architects transformed the apartment building into a luxurious compound, a process of reconstruction and renovation that took 10 years. The overhaul is complemented by the work of internationally lauded interior designer Jonathan Rachman.
The whole point of the hearing on the North Beach building: Under city law, consolidating or eliminating any rental units requires a conditional use permit from the City Planning Commission. The planners say no such permit was issued for the Vallejo Street property.
The same appears to be true for the much larger mansion on Jackson and Presidio.
City property records presented to the Planning Commission show that as recently as 2017, the property at Jackson and Presidio was listed as seven units.
Now it’s a massive single-family mansion.
I can find no record at the Planning Commission of a CU permit for that address, or even an application for one. Several people involved with the department told me that any permit of that type would have been rejected anyway; the city doesn’t allow conversion on this scale. Even proposals to turn two units into one are typically rejected.
A DBI complaint filed Jan 29, 2026 stated:
Property is being marketed as a single-family dwelling with street address 3199 Jackson Street, but its APN is 0983/022, which has street addresses 104-114 Presidio Ave. associated with it. It does not appear that the property received approval to merge dwelling units. One Planning application for Conditional Use Authorization for the property to go from 7 to 3 dwelling units (2017-001217) was withdrawn in 2018.
BDI has known about this since 2021, when a complaint noted “Illegal merging of 7 unit building to single family home.”
The inspector, records show, simply checked the Planning Commission records, which still (of course) showed it as a seven-unit building. The case was closed. Records show no site visit or further investigation.
The speaker’s point: If we allow the North Beach building to get retroactive legalization, this one will be next. And all over the city, rental units will be lost as more speculators look to cash in on the AI-driven boom in giant mansions.
If you like the idea of giving the mayor, who already has a lot more power than the mayors of most cities, even more power, and you want to give the district supervisors less power, and the residents even less than that, you will love the City Charter reform proposed by Mayor Daniel Lurie and Sup. Rafael Mandelman.
The measure would wipe out the role of commissions in hiring department heads and would make it more difficult for citizens to file ballot initiatives. It would undermine decades of reforms that sought to limit corruption and abuse of power in the Mayor’s Office. It doesn’t even address economic inequality.
The Board of Supes will hold a hearing on the proposal Tuesday/17. That’s the only time the public will have a chance to comment on the plan before it gets approved and goes to the ballot.
I have no doubt that Lurie’s loyalists on the board plan to vote for his proposal—but labor leaders don’t like it, neighborhood activists don’t like it, and if the supes hear from enough people who oppose the plan, they might, maybe, think twice.
That hearing will happen sometime after 3pm.
A final note: I am 68, and not terribly good at new technology. I know I’m not alone; even seniors like me, who are not entirely stupid and once made a living fixing cars and motorcycles, can have trouble with things like installing a new modem and router.
Case in point: My Xfinity router stopped working this week. I unplugged it and took it to the Xfinity store, and a very nice young man gave me a new one. I asked him if the instructions were included.
“There are no instructions,” he said, telling me to scan a QR code and use the Xfinity app, which would tell me how to activate the new device.
The app didn’t activate the modem. It said: “something isn’t working.”
So I called the number the Xfinity store gave me for the “activation hotline,” which is supposed to connect you to someone who can turn the new modem and router on.
But after an hour, it became clear to me that there is no way to get a human being on the phone at Xfinity. I’m pretty good at finding ways to get past the phone robots; this one was impossible.
(I love messages that say I can get help online, when my problem is that I can’t get online.)
The next morning, I finally got another very nice person on the app through a direct chat, but it wasn’t easy with limited data service (yeah, T-Mobile sucks in Bernal Heights; the company sent me a device that boosts my service—but it runs through the modem, which wasn’t working. My land line also runs through the modem).
It took two days of anger and stress to do something that should have taken 30 minutes.
I’m just going to say that this is age discrimination. I know there are some brilliant, tech-savvy seniors, but there are also a lot of us who have more trouble with modern tech than younger people. We grew up working with things we could see and touch (engines, transmissions, plumbing, light bulbs, two-by-fours, screws and bolts) and some of our brains aren’t wired for things we can’t see and touch (software, operating systems, the firmware in that fucking modem and router). I get frustrated tying to use a phone app to do a long, detailed live chat on a tiny keyboard when one typo in the 12-digit modem serial number crashes the entire deal.
I like to talk to an actual person the way I used to—on the phone. I think I am not alone.
I wish some state legislator would introduce a bill that required every company in California that offers the technology needed for normal life (Xfinity, AT&T, T-Mobil, Apple, etc.) to have an option on their robot phone system that says:
“If you are old and need to speak to a human being, press 4.”
I suspect a lot of the 6 million California voters who are over 65 would support that.
