Stadium To Anchor Major Mixed-Use Plan

SAN FRANCISCO-The City of San Francisco this week released the details of a plan for redeveloping two well-known chunks of its southeast shore, Candlestick Point and Hunters Point Shipyard. The combined plan calls for a new NFL football stadium, two million sf of office space, 700,000 sf of retail and entertainment uses, 9,000 housing units (25% affordable), 350 acres of open space and an 8,000 to 12,000 seat performance venue.

Lennar Corp., the Miami-based Fortune 500 company the city tapped to manage the redevelopment efforts, released a plan for Candlestick Point only in late November that included the NFL stadium. The plan was released despite the fact that two weeks earlier the San Francisco 49ers, citing among other things a lack of surface parking for fans’ pre- and post-game tailgate parties, announced they would focus on building a new stadium in the city of Santa Clara.

In an attempt to shift the San Francisco 49ers attention back inside city limits, a key component of Mayor Gavin Newsom’s plan calls for the stadium to be built on Hunter’s Point, a contaminated 500-acre site the Navy is cleaning up and conveying to the city’s redevelopment agency in stages. The Navy has said it would expedite the clean-up and conveyance of the 27-acre stadium site by June 2009 to facilitate the football team’s goal of playing in a new stadium in 2012. Additionally, the city would encircle the stadium with expansive fields of reinforced grass that would be used for tailgating on game days and for sports and other recreation the rest of the year.