San Francisco just approved a building without deciding what it is.
536 Mission Street cleared entitlement this week with two alternative programs attached. Option one is mixed-use: 385 residential units, studios through three-bedrooms, in a tower reaching 698 feet. Option two drops the housing entirely and goes commercial at 752 feet. McCourt Partners and Lincoln Property Co. are developing; Skidmore, Owings & Merrill is the architect.
Optionality is the product
Dual-program approvals aren’t new, but they’re getting more common in markets where the developer genuinely cannot forecast which use will pencil by the time capital is ready. Downtown San Francisco is that market right now. Office absorption has been improving off a very low base while residential construction financing in California remains difficult, and neither trend is stable enough to bet a 700-foot tower on four years ahead of delivery.
Getting both schemes through planning means the entitlement itself becomes the asset. The developer can market the site, raise against it, or sell it without going back for a second approval when the answer changes.
What is not in the approval
No general contractor. No construction cost. No groundbreaking date. Jordan Lang, president of McCourt Partners, framed it as delivering “downtown’s next great building,” and the developers state roughly four years from groundbreaking to completion, which is a reasonable duration for a tower this size and tells you nothing about when the clock starts.
For contractors, that combination matters. An entitled site with two schemes and no GC is not a bid opportunity. It is a piece of inventory that becomes one when construction financing closes, and the gap between those two events in San Francisco has been running years, not months.
The structural difference is bigger than the height
The two options are 54 feet apart in height and considerably further apart in everything else. A residential tower at 698 feet with 385 units carries a different core, a different floor-to-floor, a different mechanical distribution and a different facade module than a commercial building at 752 feet. SOM has effectively designed two towers, and whichever one gets built will have been carrying the other one’s constraints through design development.
That is the cost of optionality, and someone pays it. In a tower this size it is usually the eventual contractor, who inherits a scheme optimised for flexibility rather than for buildability.
Source: Multifamily Dive, 2026-09-24.