A housing development one block from the 24th Street BART station has been quietly downsized from 35 units to 20 — a 43 percent reduction — after the developer held discussions with an unelected community group, with no public hearing required or expected.

The pullback at 3230 24th St. in San Francisco's Mission District spotlights an informal but consequential power dynamic: a neighborhood advocacy organization with no official planning role shaped a significant housing decision that will proceed without public scrutiny, in a city that cannot afford to lose homes near transit.

Developer Peter Logan filed formal planning documents with the city on June 25 proposing a six-story, 20-unit building at 3230 24th St. — down from the eight-story, 35-unit complex announced six months earlier. The site is a wedge-shaped parking lot at 24th and Capp streets, roughly a block from the 24th Street BART station.

Logan, who leads Trigona LLC and is a partner at Wong Logan Architects — the firm designing the project — attributed the reduction to talks with Mission District group Calle 24. "Following productive discussions with Calle 24 and other community members, we reduced the building's scale from eight-stories to six-stories to better align with the surrounding scale of the neighborhood," he told Mission Local. Logan said the project shrank 25 percent in overall size; the steeper drop in unit count — from 35 to 20, a 43 percent cut — results from enlarging many of the remaining apartments.

The revised building would stand 66 feet tall and include 10 studios, five two-bedroom units, and five three-bedroom units, eliminating the 14 one-bedroom apartments in the original plan. Two units will be affordable for households earning up to 60 percent of area median income — $68,050 for an individual, $87,550 for a family of three — and 18 will be market rate. The project carries an estimated price tag of $10 million; construction is at least a year away.

Calle 24 holds no formal role in San Francisco's planning process, but the group — carrying a city-designated "Latino Cultural District" status since 2014 — has wielded significant de facto leverage over Mission District development. Susana Rojas, the organization's executive director, confirmed negotiations are continuing. "The conversations are still ongoing," she told Mission Local. "We'd like to see a meeting in the community for people to have an opportunity to weigh in on the design of the project."

A San Francisco Planning Department spokesperson told Mission Local the project does not require a public hearing and is not expected to come before the Planning Commission. The Dissent independently verified this: a check of the Planning Department's public notices portal in mid-July found no hearing scheduled or posted for 3230 24th St.

That determination may warrant scrutiny. Under California's SB 423 ministerial-approval statute, projects in census tracts designated as low- or moderate-resource areas on the state's Opportunity Map must present at a Planning Commission informational hearing before ministerial approval can proceed. SF Planning's own Director Bulletin No. 5 states the department "will not accept an SB 423 Application until the informational hearing, if required, has been completed." Separately, the state's Housing Crisis Act allows projects to lose streamlined protections when unit counts change by 20 percent or more — a threshold the 43 percent reduction here far exceeds. Whether 3230 24th St.'s census tract carries the designation that triggers those requirements has not been publicly addressed by the Planning Department.

The developer's scaling back also leaves two businesses on the lot in uncertain territory. Juanita's Flowers expects to move into one of the building's two retail spaces once construction is complete, but has yet to secure a temporary location for the interim. "We feel good about it and being able to occupy one of the commercial spaces," said Jose Barajas, who co-owns Juanita's Flowers with his wife. "But, it'll affect us if we can't sell during all that time. We still haven't found an alternative site yet." The fate of Birrieria Lucas, a food truck operating from the same lot, remains unresolved.

The site has a history of failed proposals. In 2017, the lot's previous owners proposed a five-story, 17-unit building that stalled after neighbors objected to its two-unit affordability offer. The current project cleared that early hurdle, in part because Logan engaged Calle 24 before filing — but whether that informal diplomacy cost the city 15 homes it cannot afford to lose is a question the Planning Department has yet to answer publicly.