Edwin M. Lee Apartments
Architecture Firm: LEDDY MAYTUM STACY Architects, Saida+Sullivan Design Partners
Owner: Chinatown Community Development Center and Swords to Plowshares
Location: San Francisco
Project site: Previously developed land
Building program type(s): Residential – Multi-Family 5 or more units, Residential – Mid-Rise/High-Rise
Edwin M. Lee Apartments, the first combined homeless veteran and low-income family development in San Francisco, has established a new definition for integrated, equitable, and resilient living. The design balances a civic scale with a feeling of home, responding to the Third Street corridor with a colorful serrated rainscreen façade while offering an oasis-like restorative landscape within. The dramatic solar canopy that cascades to the south entrance is a proud demonstration of low-carbon design.
Operated by nonprofits
Swords to Plowshares and Chinatown Community Development Center, Edwin M. Lee
Apartments provides 62 apartments for formerly homeless veterans and 57
apartments for families earning between 50% and 60% AMI. The building provides
ground-floor counseling and career services for veteran residents, and Swords
to Plowshares operates a kitchen offering free meals in the community room at
the center of the building, adjacent to the courtyard garden. The project is
named after the late San Francisco mayor, Edwin M. Lee, the son of a veteran
who dedicated his career to affordable housing and ending veteran homelessness. The
project’s climate-responsive massing and organization allows for families and
veterans to form a new community centered on the shared gardens and common
areas. The façade design integrates daylight access, views, and opportunities
for regenerating an ecology on a previously paved site. The integrated design
creates a healthy, energy efficient, resilient,
and regenerative complex that provides social, economic, and environmental value to the residents and
the greater community.
