A 27-story residential tower — an infill development slated for a SoMa alley that's been in the design and planning stages for over four years now — is set to get its entitlements this week, if all goes well at the Planning Commission.

The project, known only as 469 Stevenson Street, is heading for a parking lot on Stevenson (an alley between Market and Mission streets), between Fifth and Sixth streets. As Socketsite reports, the parcel is owned by Nordstrom's, and the project has been scaled down in terms of height since it was originally proposed as 35 stories back in 2017.

Now proposed to top out at 284 feet hight, the tower will still be a significant addition to a part of SoMa that is quickly becoming unrecognizable to many — with the rise of the new construction at the 5M project nearby, in particular.

A Draft Environmental Impact Report (EIR) that originally was submitted to the Planning Department a week before the pandemic lockdown last March, is set to be approved this week without much objection, per Socketsite. An original timeline that this tower being completed by 2024 now sounds like it's a year behind.

A rendering of the ground floor of 469 Stevenson, via architects SCB

The building is proposed to house 495 residential units, a plurality of them (225) studios or "junior one-bedrooms." The project is taking advantage of the density-bonus law that allows for developments to rise higher than the 160 feet that this part of the city is zoned for, and the unit mix also includes 116 one-bedrooms, 96 two-bedrooms, 50 three-bedrooms, and 8 five-bedroom units, which are perhaps penthouses. Below ground there will be 178 parking spaces for cars, and 200 spaces for bikes.

The developer behind the project is BUILD Inc., and it's being designed by the firm of Solomon Cordwell Buenz (SCB)

Also proposed is 4,000 square feet of retail space with frontage on the parallel alleyway, Jessie Street. And the building will cast further shadows on the already shadowy Mint Plaza.

BUILD, meanwhile, still has that stalled 40-story tower theoretically in the works near the foot of Van Ness at Market, known as One Oak, which we learned in January of last year was being marketed for sale as a fully entitled project. That 319-unit project apparently doesn't "pencil," according to the developer, once you factored in construction costs and the city's requirement to fund 94 affordable units on nearby Octavia Street. As of early last year, BUILD said it was close to a deal with an investor, as the SF Business Times reported, but these days construction costs have only skyrocketed, so who knows where this stands.