Site prep is underway at 2918 Mission St, the former Wash Club laundromat that became a flashpoint in the pre-pandemic housing wars. The eight-story, 75-unit building — with eight affordable units — rises on a lot that has sat empty since 2022.

On the 2900 block of Mission Street, between 25th and 26th, there is a fenced dirt lot where a single-story laundromat used to be. The Wash Club came down in June 2022. For three years since, the site at 2918 Mission St. has been a hole in the block — plywood, chain-link, the occasional tag. The SF Chronicle's J.K. Dineen reports that has finally changed: Cresleigh Homes has begun site preparation and foundation work, with vertical construction on an eight-story, 75-unit rental building scheduled to start next year.

It is a long-delayed ending to one of the loudest fights the Mission had before the pandemic.

Cresleigh, led by developer Lawrence Lui, bought the property in April 2019 for $13.5 million — from Robert Tillman, the owner who had already spent five years and more than a million dollars pushing the project through approvals, and who sued the city for $17 million in 2018 over the delays. The approved building runs about 84 feet and roughly 67,000 square feet, with two ground-floor retail spaces and eight below-market units — about 11 percent of the total, a share former Planning Commissioner Rodney Fong criticized as too thin.

The four-year war (2014 to 2018) was never really about a laundromat. It was about what the building had been. From the early 1970s through the mid-1980s, 2918 Mission housed a cluster of Mission Coalition Organization offshoots — the Mission Hiring Hall, Mission Housing Development Corporation, the Mission Child Care Consortium — the machinery of Latino community organizing at the moment it entered city politics. Calle 24 Latino Cultural District filed the preservation appeal; MEDA demanded the site be rebuilt as 100 percent affordable housing. San Francisco's planning department rejected the historic claim, finding the structure "lacks sufficient integrity to convey its identified historic significance." The appeal was defeated in September 2018. The Mission Hiring Hall now operates from 3080 16th St.

Beneath the preservation argument was a plainer fear: that a sleek new building would pull in tech salaries and press harder on a neighborhood that had lost thousands of Latino families as it turned from working-class to coveted. That pressure has not eased. In the last 90 days, 47 eviction notices were filed in the Mission, per city Rent Board data — recent ones on the 1700 block of Mission and the 400 block of South Van Ness. The neighborhood logged roughly 2,470 requests to 311 in the past week alone.

What someone walking past 2918 Mission will notice tomorrow is still just the fence. But behind it, after eleven years, the ground is finally moving.