San Francisco's second market-rate start since 2023 is a 2028 bet

Since 2023, San Francisco has seen one market-rate apartment building larger than 28 units break ground, and 321 Florida, a 152-unit Mission District project from Ascentris and DM Development, will be the second, according to IREI. The developers have closed the project and, at the same time, a $61.7 million construction loan with PNC Bank, and for Ascentris the deal is a first on two counts: its first development and its first joint venture with DM.

The building at 321 Florida Street will rise nine stories of Type I concrete and hold 152 residences, 15 of them affordable, 39 covered parking spaces, and about 10,000 square feet of indoor-outdoor rooftop amenity including a resident lounge, fitness center, and terrace with skyline and bay views. Construction is expected to start in November 2026 and finish in late 2028, and the parking count works out to roughly a quarter space per residence, a parking-light plan that leans hard on the address, while the affordable set-aside is just under a tenth of the total.

That calendar is the real underwriting, because nobody financing ground-up apartments in this city today is pricing 2026 rents; the return case rests on delivering in late 2028, after the projects that would have competed with it failed to get financed. The next multifamily winners will be the capital that can underwrite the 2028-29 supply gap now, and 321 Florida is that position taken at construction cost rather than bought at a markdown on a finished building.

Scale is the caveat. A single start of this size says something about which lenders will still write construction debt in this city, and PNC's participation is the most informative line in the announcement, but a single closing is a long way from a thaw. San Francisco has started one comparable building in three years, and the pipeline that should have been financed alongside this one was not.

The terms would settle the argument, but the coverage does not disclose them: no loan pricing, no term, no equity split between Ascentris and DM, no total project cost. As we noted on Draper & Kramer's $93.5 million refinance of the Elizabeth, the construction loan quote inside an announcement is usually the part that matters.

Ascentris senior vice president Dylan Drescher called the site an exceptional in-fill location in a supply-constrained market, the same claim the equity is underwriting, and it gets tested in late 2028, when the residences open into whatever the city has managed to build by then.