Located at the heart of San Francisco’s western neighborhoods, Stonestown Galleria is a successful retail center serving as a community anchor for decades. The framework plan is crafted to maintain the mall while shifting from the post-war suburban mall model to an integrated neighborhood model that unlocks 30 acres of underutilized surface parking for people to live, work, and gather.

This site holds a unique opportunity in the city to deliver substantial new housing. The framework plan delivers up to 3,500 new housing units (up to 20% affordable at full build-out), a retail street with new shops and commercial spaces, neighborhood amenities, and childcare and senior center facilities – connected through a network of 6 acres of parks and complete streets.

Surrounded on all sides by surface parking and steep grade change, the site today is experienced as a car-dominant landscape separated from its neighbors. The framework plan shifts this experience, building new multi-modal connections to its surrounding neighbors. The project also builds on the energy seen inside the mall by transforming 20th Avenue — currently a circulator for parking — into a new retail-lined main street with bicycle and pedestrian-first connections to transit. A network of new open spaces and the retail spine along 20th Avenue anchor the mall entries and provide genuine points of convergence for new housing and activity. The site is also carefully phased to continue mall operations with incremental new development.

The Stonestown Design Standards and Guidelines document codifies this shared vision through performance-based requirements that strategically balance design intent, feasibility, and creative flexibility toward a more expeditious approval process.

Stonestown is a bold plan that responds to the housing crisis in San Francisco, emphasizing the importance of co-created placemaking and strategic design mechanisms and processes needed to transform a successful retail center to an integrated neighborhood.