The corridor wasn't always low-slung. Before redevelopment cleared the Western Addition in the 1950s and '60s — a federally funded project that displaced tens of thousands of residents, most of them Black, in the name of slum clearance — the blocks nearest to Van Ness and Fillmore held dense, mixed-use fabric: apartments over storefronts, corner markets, jazz venues. What replaced it, incrementally and without a strong guiding plan, tended toward the horizontal. Surface parking. Single-story retail. Auto-oriented buildings setback from the sidewalk. The bones of a transit corridor, without the flesh.

Further west, through the Richmond, Geary is functional in the way that outer-borough commercial strips are functional — dry cleaners, Vietnamese restaurants, insurance offices, the occasional dim-sum hall doing serious weekend volume — but the zoning has historically resisted the kind of height that would put apartments above all of it. The BRT lanes that opened in 2022 changed the travel time math. They did not, yet, change the parcel map.

Planning staff have flagged the Geary corridor in successive housing elements as an underbuilt transit spine. Proposals circulate. Neighbors weigh in at hearings. The single-story stucco building holds its ground.

Anyone walking the boulevard tomorrow will notice what has always been there to notice: a lot of sky above a lot of flat roofs, and underneath them, the 38 Geary running on schedule.