Greystar, the largest apartment landlord in the country, has lined up financing to put 203 units on the vacant Touchless Car Wash corner at Divisadero and Oak — and is set to break ground October 19, ending a decade of false starts on one of San Francisco's most infamous empty lots.

The groundbreaking is being sold as a clean political win: the pro-development group GrowSF, which once paid for a billboard across the street promising Supervisor Bilal Mahmood would "fix it," now declares "Bilal Mahmood Fixed It." But the paper trail complicates the victory lap. The plans were approved while Mahmood's progressive predecessor Dean Preston was still in office; the site was nearly bought for 100% affordable housing before that fell through; and the version now getting built arrives as the city has slashed its affordable-housing requirement citywide. What finally moved the lot is less a hero story than a portrait of how much has to give way before a single SF apartment building pencils out.

For years the 34,400-square-foot lot at 400 Divisadero has been shorthand for San Francisco's housing paralysis — a blighted corner in the Lower Haight, blocks from the Panhandle, empty since the Touchless Car Wash closed. As The San Francisco Standard reported↗ (external source, opens in a new tab) in February 2025, the parcel had already churned through years, three separate developers, and one fully approved plan whose builder walked before pouring a single foundation, blaming construction costs and soft rents.

The current path opened in June 2024, when 4Terra Investments filed an eight-story, 203-unit proposal that leaned on AB 2011↗ (external source, opens in a new tab) — the state law fast-tracking apartments on commercial parcels — plus the state density bonus. Planners approved it that December, with 20 of the 203 units priced below market. Greystar has since taken over and lined up the money, GrowSF says↗ (external source, opens in a new tab), with a groundbreaking scheduled for October 19.

Here is what the billboard elides. That December sign-off happened under Preston, not Mahmood, months before Mahmood took the oath. Reached by the Standard as the plan cleared, the outgoing supervisor pointedly withheld any applause: an earlier market-rate approval on the exact same lot had died once its developer bailed, he noted, and he would only wait to "see what happens." The Planning Department's chief of staff was just as unsentimental, telling the paper the build-or-not decision turns on the money, not the politics.

Mahmood's imprint landed later, and on that financial ledger — a permit-expiration reform his allies credit with roughly $4 million↗ (external source, opens in a new tab) in avoided costs, by letting a stalled project keep the building rules that applied when it first filed. That is a genuine lever. It is also a slim one next to a far larger concession the city made this summer: in July the Board of Supervisors voted 9-2 to cut the citywide inclusionary requirement↗ (external source, opens in a new tab) for market-rate housing from 15% to 5%, after the city controller cautioned that keeping it meaningfully above zero "would further threaten feasibility."

The sharpest wrinkle is what the corner nearly became. Before it turned into a YIMBY campaign trophy, Preston had been working a deal for the Tenderloin Neighborhood Development Corporation to buy the parcel outright and build fully subsidized homes — an option that dissolved when the city couldn't guarantee the funding, per the Chronicle's reporting. So the choice that actually survived was never housing against no housing. It was a fully affordable project the city declined to bankroll versus a market-rate tower from the country's biggest corporate landlord, carrying 20 permanently affordable homes out of 203.

That such an outcome now reads as a triumph is itself the tell. GrowSF bills the Greystar building as the first sizable market-rate apartment project to even begin construction anywhere in the city this year — in a San Francisco that, by the group's own tally, produced just 405 homes in the first half of 2026. One decade-long saga, one corner, 203 units. The billboard can take its bow. The bar it cleared is the story.