Design Commission Splits on Plan to Raze 12-story Parsons Tower

A plan to raze the 12-story Parsons tower for 975 apartments at 100 West Walnut Street drew praise — and sharp criticism — at the Design Commission’s first look Tuesday, July 14. 

AMLI Development Company would clear the tower, its four-story base and a surface lot for five buildings of four to seven stories, holding 975 rental units — 170 of them affordable — and 1,467 parking spaces on more than 1.1 million square feet. The site’s owner, per the meeting agenda, is PPF OFF 100 West Walnut Street, LP. 

The session was a preliminary consultation, the first step in design review. “For the public who’s listening in, we are not making a decision this evening,” Chair Julianna Delgado said. She called it “a big project” unlike any she had seen “in a number of years with this many housing units in particular.” 

Commissioner Srinivas Rao rejected the site plan. 

“This whole area is actually four city blocks,” he said, tracing an east-west rhythm of Green, Colorado and Union streets, then “a missing street,” then Walnut. 

Citing San Francisco’s Mission Bay and New York’s Battery Park City, he said the plan “misses a very, very important step.” His verdict: “So as far as I’m concerned, this is not ready to go to concept design.” 

Vice Chair Marie-Claude Fares agreed. The plans are “beautiful, but they’re bordered by very long buildings, very long façades of just multi-story residential buildings,” she said. 

Commissioner Rob Tyler was warmer but wanted more. “The architecture to me looks like a bit of a placeholder at this point,” he said, calling for public-facing uses — a coffee shop, perhaps — at Holly Plaza, an almost-acre unfenced public space aligned toward City Hall. 

Commissioner David DiCristofaro welcomed the shift from office to housing.

“We are desperately in need of new housing,” he said, pressing AMLI to consider for-sale units — “even if it’s a hundred of the 975 …” Jason Armison of AMLI said adaptive reuse of the tower, including oversized condos, was studied and dropped. “It’s an obsolete building,” he said. 

Delgado’s sharpest concern was Building E, the affordable senior building — the only one with surface parking, to be developed by an unnamed partner using traditional affordable financing. 

“No balconies and no open space and surface parking next to a neighborhood that’s supposed to be market rate,” she said. “I mean, what are we saying?” She was also “a little bit stunned that there wasn’t a little bit of commercial retail …” Staff confirmed the project has none. 

DiCristofaro pushed back on the retail point. He had the same reaction at first, he said, “but as I looked at the site and the surrounding area, I actually got pretty comfortable with that,” citing existing retail on Walnut, Fair Oaks, Union and Colorado. Rao countered: “Wherever streets go, retail goes.” 

AMLI did not name its affordable partner or commit to a construction timeline. 

“The project is not at the stage to be financed yet,” Armison said, adding, “That’s not an issue for us.” 

Using the applicant’s rule of 1.75 residents per unit, that works out to about 1,750. 

No one addressed the commission in person or online about the project.. Three letters were received. 

The one formal action on the project was procedural: a unanimous vote to bring the Urban Forestry Advisory Committee into the concept-review session to weigh — and vote on — 21 crepe myrtle street trees the applicant wants removed. 

Public Works is not recommending removal. Michael King of Public Works noted that the project’s first phase amended the master street tree plan to make crepe myrtle the designated tree for that stretch of Walnut, replacing Bradford pear, and that an applicant landscape architect had referenced planting Chinese pistache there. 

The state Housing Crisis Act of 2019 caps review at five meetings. Principal Planner Kevin Johnson said staff has raised the constraint with the state Department of Housing and Community Development. Delgado asked whether the city attorney and the applicant’s attorney might agree to a sixth, subcommittee-only session.

The project returns for concept design review, then final design review, a tentative parcel map, a development agreement amendment before the Planning Commission and City Council, and plan check. No date was set. 

Separately, the commission voted — Fares abstaining — to move regular meetings to the Hale Building hearing room at 175 N. Garfield Ave. effective July 28. Johnson said July 28 will likely be canceled; items are scheduled Aug. 11, Aug. 25 and Sept. 8.