A $160,000 over-the-counter permit for a permanent fence at 700 Missouri St is the quiet coda to this spring's HOPE SF demolition — the Potrero Annex is gone, and the search for a developer to rebuild it is not resolved.

On the 700 block of Missouri Street, the newest thing being built is a fence. City records show an over-the-counter alteration permit — number 202607305806, filed July 30, estimated at $160,000 — for a permanent site fence to secure a vacant lot in Potrero Hill. Existing use: vacant lot. Proposed use: vacant lot. It is the kind of permit that reads like an afterthought, and it is: the fence goes up because the buildings came down.

They came down this spring. DataSF lists a cluster of demolition permits issued in April for 700 Missouri St — six of them, at $60,000 apiece, plus another at 901 Missouri — the paperwork behind the teardown of the Potrero Annex, the 1955 public-housing complex of low-slung two-story apartments that stood here for seventy years. The Annex was 137 units across Turner Terrace, Watchman Way, and Missouri; its demolition, part of the long-running HOPE SF plan to replace roughly 620 aging public-housing units with as many as 1,700 mixed-income homes, runs into early 2027. Potrero Terrace, built in 1941 across the way, is scheduled to follow.

That is the plan on paper. On the ground it has meant relocation notices — 66 Annex households were given 90-day notices in February 2025 — and, now, a graded lot behind chain-link. The neighborhood around it keeps living: six eviction notices were filed in Potrero Hill in the last 90 days, and 218 requests came into 311 in the last week.

What the fence secures is not just a construction site but an open question. BRIDGE Housing, the nonprofit master developer since 2008, has signaled it is stepping back from the remaining phases; a request for qualifications for a successor is out, and as of this month no new developer has been named. Block B, 157 affordable homes and a childcare center, broke ground in 2022 and is real. The rest of the site is a fence, a permit number, and a promise of return for the people who used to live inside it.

Anyone walking Missouri Street tomorrow will see the same thing: new posts, taut wire, and behind them, nothing yet.