A single $1.5 million tenant-improvement permit filed July 30 would convert floors 1–3 of 952 and 960 Howard Street from manufacturing to residential units, business, and PDR space in South of Market.

On Howard Street in South of Market, two adjacent buildings are proposing to stop making things and start housing people — and they filed to do it on the same piece of paper.

The permit is number 202603238063, filed July 30 with the Department of Building Inspection and logged as an "additions, alterations or repairs" job carrying an estimated cost of $1.5 million. It lands twice in the city's records, once under 952 Howard Street and once under 960 Howard Street next door, sharing that single permit number. The described work is identical for both: gut floors one through three, partition them into residential units alongside business space and PDR, and install the mechanical, electrical, and plumbing infrastructure that housing needs and a manufacturing floor never did.

PDR is the city's shorthand for Production, Distribution, and Repair — the workshops, small fabricators, and back-of-house trades that South of Market has long been zoned to protect. That the permit keeps PDR in the mix rather than erasing it is worth noting: the existing use here is listed flatly as manufacturing, and the proposed use is apartments, business, and that retained working space — the old function surviving in a corner of the new one, rather than being converted wall to wall.

The paperwork does not say how many units, and it does not name a developer or a departing tenant, so this piece won't either. What it says is that two buildings on one block, in Supervisor District 6, want to change what they are, and that a landlord thought it worth $1.5 million to try.

The block is not quiet around them. In South of Market, 33 eviction notices have been filed in the last 90 days, and the neighborhood logged 915 requests to 311 in the last week alone. A conversion permit is a filing, not a finished building; floors one through three of 952 and 960 Howard are still, for now, what they've long been. Someone walking past tomorrow would see no change but the notice in the window.