Candlestick Point Plans Come to Light

SAN FRANCISCO-Lennar Communities has unveiled designs for a mixed-use community on Candlestick Point. The project will be anchored by a sports complex whether or not the 49ers remain in town . The Wednesday presentation to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in part focused on how the development would provide football fans the premier game-day experience–despite the fact that the San Francisco 49ers specifically cited a compromised fan experience when it publicly shunned the location on Nov. 8.

The new 68,000-seat stadium, which appears headed to Santa Clara, was to be the centerpiece of a redevelopment that is still slated to include a multi-sport arena, new market rate and affordable housing, retail and entertainment uses, public parks and open space, and improved access to the San Francisco Bay shoreline. The nagging question now is what might replace the stadium, but the presentation was made as if the stadium was still going to happen.

“The presentation was an effort by Lennar as well as the city to publicly show the depth and scale and progressiveness of the plan,” a source representing Lennar tells GlobeSt.com. “There was no info on what might replace the stadium because we all remain hopeful that the 49ers will change their mind and remain in San Francisco.”The current plan calls for 6,500 new homes, a new 8,000 to 10,000 seat arena, approximately 400,000 sf of retail and entertainment uses, 150,000 sf of office space, a new 200-room hotel, and over 150 acres of parks and open space. As for the NFL stadium, the presentation trumpeted the “urban tailgating opportunities,” otherwise known as eating and drinking in the various sports bars, restaurants and live music venues that are slated to be clustered along a retail street leading to the stadium plaza. For the traditional tailgaters–who cook and drink store-bought drinks and food in the acres of surface parking that typically surrounds stadiums–the plan includes fewer than 3,000 surface parking spaces, a fact that the San Francisco 49ers bemoaned when they announced the stadium would not be built at Candlestick Point.