Historic Designation For Ingleside's Ocean Avenue Remains In Limbo. Why?

Delay after delay has hit a community-sponsored measure to bestow historic district designation on several blocks of Ingleside’s Ocean Avenue.

The San Francisco Planning Department has had the application for the Ocean Avenue Neighborhood Commercial Historic District for years, but planners held it until related studies were completed. Now, almost 18 months after assigning a planner to the project, the department has yet to hold a community meeting or set a timeline for completion.

The Ocean Avenue Association, the nonprofit funded by property owners to improve the avenue, started the project in the summer of 2013. Local artist Neil Ballard, then working for the association under Dan Weaver, recalled that the overarching goal was to protect small, attainable storefronts for independent small businesses. At a time when big box-style and new storefronts were empty and real estate speculators were buying commercial properties.

“We have these huge vacancies in these newer buildings that get built like the corporations that come and go like CVS, Walgreens and Target, and now Wells Fargo,” Ballard said. “Small business can’t even get in the door in those big old spaces, so it was a way to protect what’s there. We really had small business in mind.”

The city’s efforts to meet a state-mandated housing construction goal of 82,000 units by 2031 have the small business community watching Mayor Daniel Lurie’s sweeping upzoning plan with concern. The Planning Department estimates about 53 businesses per year could be evicted as a result of the proposed rezoning. 

Ocean Avenue was upzoned in 2008, and the upzoning plan, set to be finalized in coming months, would make slight height increases and other changes. But over the last few months, historic districts have become a source of controversy. 

“The restriction is going to make new developments to this neighborhood even harder." —Tiffany Zhang

Earlier this year, Lurie stepped in to delay a hearing for the North Beach National Register historic district. One press report labeled the Ingleside Terraces Homes Association bid for historic district status as a means to sidestep new housing.

Tiffany Zhang owns and operates Little Panda Preschool on Holloway Avenue and has a second location under construction on Ocean Avenue. She expressed apprehension over the historic district designation.

“The restriction is going to make new developments to this neighborhood even harder,” Zhang said.

San Francisco Heritage President Woody LaBounty said historic districts are not anti-housing and not restrictive to changes or the demolition of buildings within district boundaries.

“The point of all this is not to try to stop housing,” said LaBounty. “It's to have managed discussions about the important, special places and not just let decisions come from some top-down place where nobody has a say.”

Many Delays

The Ocean Avenue Neighborhood Commercial Historic District would encompass the southside of the avenue from Plymouth Avenue to Victoria Avenue with a one-building addition for Beep’s Burgers. The northside would include Plymouth Avenue to Lakewood Avenue. It targets buildings between 1906 and 1960.

Historic districts offer building owners property tax reductions and access to tax credits along with protection of a corridor’s unique character, according to the Planning Department.

San Francisco has just over a dozen historic districts. The most notable of late is Jackson Square, which has been a magnet for investment by the superrich.

The Planning Department identified parts of Ocean Avenue eligible for a historic district in 2004, and in 2010 the late planner Mary Brown attended a meeting of the defunct Ocean Avenue Revitalization Collaborative, a city-backed organization that became the Ocean Avenue Association, to discuss the historic district. But the Planning Department’s work stalled.

In 2013, under expert guidance from an Office of Economic & Workforce Development staffer, the association took the matter into its own hands and enlisted San Francisco State University students to conduct a study and present their findings. (Disclosure: The Ingleside Light's Alex Mullaney was involved in overseeing the project at the time.)

After rounds of community meetings, the association advanced the project by obtaining a $38,000 grant from the Historic Preservation Fund Committee to hire expert consultants to prepare a full-fledged application.

Architectural historians Bridget Maley and Shane Watson dug into the history of 80 properties, locating primary records to complete detailed evaluations. What they found was enough to create a California Register-eligible historic district.

The district is representative of a changing demographic of uses and users, including a growing African American community after World War II. Many of its commercial buildings were occupied by African American merchants or catered to the growing African American residents after the war. The district is also representative of neighborhood commercial corridors as defined in the Neighborhood Commercial Buildings Historic Context Statement of 2016.

In 2019, after several rounds of revisions with the Planning Department, city planners said the application was ready for the Historic Preservation Commission. But it didn’t happen, and then pandemic struck.

In 2021, planners asked for revisions to align the application with the Citywide Cultural Resources Survey. In 2022, planners paused the application for the completion of the African American Historic Context Statement, a study that explores the significant contributions that African Americans have made in San Francisco’s economic and cultural zones. The Planning Commission adopted the statement in February 2024.

Planner Moses Corrette began reviewing associated documents in February 2024. In February 2025, a spokesperson for the Planning Department told The Light the “department is completing its analysis and will be convening a community meeting in the next few months to discuss the findings.” Corrette attended the Ocean Avenue Association's April 2025 meeting to relay that he would be holding meetings about the district in the coming months.

The department has provided no date for advancing the district by holding the community meeting or putting it before the Historic Preservation Commission.

A Tool For Public Participation

LaBounty, a former columnist for The Ingleside Light and westside historian who worked on a survey of the Ocean View-Merced Heights-Ingleside’s historic resources circa 2004, said the overall process for setting up a district has many steps, including researching, going through a planning department and the historic preservation commission, going through the Board of Supervisors' land use committee and then to the full board and then to the mayor’s office.

Organizations like LaBounty’s SF Heritage say historic designations are the last remaining tool to protect special places as state streamlining laws and city upzoning strip away the public’s right to planning reviews and public comment. But even these protections have limitations: The historic landmark at 447 Battery St. is set to be demolished.

“Preservation isn’t anti-anything, especially not anti-housing. It’s pro-San Francisco and pro-us all talking together about what we want to save.” —Woody LaBounty

Some politicians are interested in examining the value of an Ocean Avenue historic district.

“I look forward to reviewing the proposal and working through the Planning Department to identify the historic elements along Ocean Avenue,” District 7 Supervisor Myrna Melgar said.

The Office of District 11 Supervisor Chyanne Chen, who represents the south side of Ocean Avenue, did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

“Preservation isn’t anti-anything, especially not anti-housing,” LaBounty said. “It’s pro-San Francisco and pro-us all talking together about what we want to save.”