Mayor Daniel Lurie's newest housing showpiece is a shuttered discount department store at 901 Market St. — but the announcement that the former Nordstrom Rack will become 136 apartments came with no figure for how many of those units will be affordable.

The conversion, announced Monday, is the centerpiece of the mayor's pitch that San Francisco can solve its housing shortage by turning empty commercial buildings into homes. Yet the residents KTVU interviewed about the announcement kept returning to the one number officials didn't provide — affordability — underscoring the gap between a splashy conversion count and the question of who actually gets to live there.

Mayor Daniel Lurie announced Monday that the former Nordstrom Rack at 901 Market St. will be converted into 136 apartments — a mix of studios, one- and two-bedroom units carved into the building's second through sixth floors, according to the city. The historic facades along Market, Fifth and Stevenson streets would be preserved, ground- and lower-level retail would stay, and the building's indoor atrium would be reopened as an outdoor courtyard.

It is the kind of tidy before-and-after the mayor has made central to his housing message: a vacant retail box downtown, reborn as housing. The city says it is streamlining approvals to make more of these conversions happen, pointing to similar plans at former office buildings at 150 Hayes St. in Hayes Valley, 575 Sutter St. near Union Square, and 2300 Stockton St. by Pier 39.

What the announcement did not include was any commitment on affordability. As KTVU reported, city leaders have not announced how many of the 136 units — if any — will be priced below market. For a project being sold as a fix for the city's housing crisis, that omission is the story.

The residents KTVU interviewed said as much. "I think that the city definitely needs more housing. That's for sure, and especially more housing that can accommodate people who are more in the middle," Andy Kang told KTVU. Kang said he was recently priced out of a Hayes Valley apartment after a steep rent increase and found a new unit in the Mid-Market area.

Others were blunter about who tends to get left out. "My concern is just low-income housing for low-income people like myself, low-income families," said Akeem Raheem, a Bayview resident. "Sometimes we get forgot about."

The affordability silence is conspicuous because Lurie, according to KTVU, said the city is also pursuing housing through his Family Zoning Plan — a broader rezoning effort. Unit counts and preserved storefronts are the easy part of that message. The number that decides whether new apartments reach the "middle" and "low-income" residents interviewed about the plan described is the part the city has not put on paper.

The private-sector co-star complicates the picture further. The same day, at an event at Chase Center, JPMorgan Chase announced a $200 million investment to help finance San Francisco housing, including 342 homes at the Potrero Power Station development in Dogpatch — a different project than the Nordstrom Rack conversion. The San Francisco Standard, which interviewed JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon, reported he used the visit to praise Lurie while criticizing taxes. The optics are striking: a marquee week for the mayor's housing push that leans on a bank chief executive whose policy ask is lower taxes, set against a conversion plan with no disclosed below-market units.

None of this makes 136 new homes unwelcome in a city that has spent years failing to build enough of them. The 901 Market conversion preserves a landmark storefront and reactivates dead retail floors — real wins. But the mayor's office is asking the public to score the housing push on unit counts while withholding the number that determines whether those units reach the people showing up to ask for them. Until the city releases an affordability mix for 901 Market, the announcement is a headline, not a housing plan.