After nearly two years of starts and stumbles, the thorny saga of Brownstone Shared Housing’s “pod homes” in downtown San Francisco has finally concluded — for now, at least.
The Board of Supervisors this week passed legislation that streamlines fees and zoning requirements for residential conversions of former office spaces, in an effort to boost the revitalization of empty buildings in Downtown.
It means that Brownstone’s conversion of a former bank office at 12 Mint Plaza, into a shared living space with 30 bunk-bed-like pods at $700 a pop, can finally move forward after fears it would be stuck in limbo. Due to a variety of missteps, the company owed more than $300,000 in fees, and Brownstone was restricted to renting just 13 pods.
“It would’ve made the project basically impossible,” Stallworth told Gazetteer SF.
Now, it’s full steam ahead. Stallworth says the company has found a second property in Downtown to build out 100 pods, and secured initial agreements for two more facilities in Oakland (near MacArthur Station), and San Jose (blocks from the campus of San José State University). All are intended to debut this year, with Brownstone’s website already promoting openings for Oakland in April and San Jose in September.
The company’s rough go in S.F., meanwhile, calls into question how smoothly those developments will go.
Brownstone began building out the S.F. project in May 2023. Just one month later, the company opened its doors to residents. Then everything came screeching to a halt.
It turned out that Brownstone had failed to secure several construction and zoning permits, triggering investigations by the San Francisco Planning Department and the Department of Building Inspection in September 2023. Most egregious was that the company had not formally changed the property’s designated use from commercial to residential space.
As Stallworth describes in a lengthy blog post, the city continually found issues with the plans filed by his architect. He argues that much of the delay was due to the planning department not responding or sending him down dead-ends, while the city has claimed that Brownstone failed to answer basic requests and deliver paperwork on time.
Then, in December 2024, Planning found a discrepancy that meant Brownstone owed over $300,000 in fees levied on market-rate projects to fund low-income affordable housing. (The alternative is to provide on-site units for low-income residents, but the city determined the pods did not qualify.)
Despite the frustrations, Stallworth claims that there is significant demand for the pods. At $700 a month, the price seems steep for a glorified dorm-life arrangement, and is not at all a panacea for the housing crisis impacting working-class individuals and families in particular. But the figure is far less than the $2,300 average rent for a studio in the Bay Area, too.
Stallworth says that he and his co-founder, Cristina Lennox, conceptualized Brownstone while thinking about their own struggles to find and keep housing in the region. They met while working at the state auditor’s office, and Stallworth believes that access to jobs and schooling should not be determined by housing prices, especially in the highly unequal economy of the Bay Area.
“To me, the pandemic showed that the government wasn’t going to solve the housing problem,” Stallworth said. “And the private market also seemed fixated on things like luxury housing, short-term rentals, stuff we didn’t think the world needs more of.”
He remains critical of the city’s Planning Department, describing it as “unnecessarily adversarial,” while complimenting the city of San Jose on its help. Stallworth said he got a call from Mayor Matt Mahan personally to discuss the pod project and ask whether Brownstone needs assistance on any obstacles.
“It’s been the complete opposite of S.F.,” he concluded.
While the Board of Supervisors hearing on Tuesday was good news for Brownstone, public comments also highlighted key concerns about streamlining office-to-residential conversions by cutting development impact and “inclusionary housing” fees, intended to support the creation of subsidized affordable housing.
Supervisor Connie Chan, who is head of the city’s budget and finance committee, argued that the fees are crucial for S.F.’s long-term housing goals. So did community advocacy organizations like the South of Market Community Action Network, whose members told the board they were worried about gentrification and fewer financial resources for equitable housing development.
Nonetheless, Stallworth is committed to his vision for a different kind of affordable housing, and says he still has “no regrets” about pushing his pod dorm to fruition, even when I suggest that he could’ve probably benefited from a development consultant.
“What we’re doing is new. I think because the idea is new, the city was throwing out things to stop it moving forward,” he said. “Nothing in the law says that you can’t have pods. We didn’t need a consultant to tell us that.”
