San Francisco Chronicle, by J.K. Dineen
Over the past year the ceremonial groundbreaking, where politicians and developers put on shiny hard hats and celebrate the city’s latest real estate milestone by flinging ceremonial dirt with ceremonial shovels, has vanished into the COVID abyss.
But on Thursday, in a sign that the city could be starting to return to some sense of normal, Mayor London Breed and other City Hall officials gathered on a construction site just south of Market Street in masks to mark the redevelopment of a quintessential San Francisco mega-development that has something for everyone: a new union hall for Plumbers and Pipefitters Local 38, 96 units of supportive housing for the formerly homeless, a park for the neighborhood and hundreds of market rate apartments that will sprout from a patchwork of surface parking lots.