Patrick Quinlan sat hunched outside the Memorial Court Gatesm across Van Ness Avenue from City Hall, hoping the next few phone calls he’d make could keep his dream of building housing alive.
Back in 1978, Quinlan purchased land in Bernal Heights, hoping to develop it and fund his retirement. After navigating some unworkable plans, and neighbors’ opposition since he submitted proposals in the ‘90s, Quinlan finally secured the entitlements in 2019: Five sets of duplexes at 1513 York St., totaling 10 units.
“I thought it would end in bankruptcy. It’s a happier ending than I thought,” Quinlan excitedly told Mission Local in 2019, believing development was around the corner.
But he spoke too soon — before a pandemic, before a poor housing market, and before interest rates rose. Instead, on Tuesday, the lender Gerrard McConville foreclosed on the property after Quinlan stopped making mortgage payments, thus closing the final chapter on the 81-year-old’s Sisyphean development saga.
“After 44 years, I don’t get anything,” Quinlan said.
Quinlan’s hopes died not with a bang, but with an auction. A foreclosure auction for 1513 York St. was scheduled outside the Memorial Court Gates at 1:30 p.m. on Tuesday, in case anyone wanted to buy the property; the opening bid was $1.75 million. No one did. No one even showed up. It was unclear if the auctioneer attended either, because well after 1:30 p.m., no public declaration appeared to have been made, and no one neared Quinlan at all, save for an occasional tourist or ballet dancer en route to practice.
But when Quinlan called the foreclosure company, Golden West Foreclosure Service, a representative insisted the auction had indeed occurred. It was over. The property would be returned to McConville, and there was no way Quinlan could appeal the decision.
“It’s a sad story,” said Tim Brown, a friend of Quinlan’s and his main business partner on the project.
Right after Quinlan secured the entitlements to build 10 units of housing on York Street from the Planning Commission, the pandemic arrived. Quinlan stopped paying the mortgage to McConville because he could not afford the interest rates and financial losses courtesy of the pandemic, he said. Ultimately, Quinlan decided to sell.
Brown, also a real-estate broker for Brown Real Estate Group, said he tried to sell the property and delay a foreclosure for as long as possible. Quinlan asked to list it at $4 million a year-and-a-half ago, but no one bit, Brown said. Instead, in 2022, Brown helped Quinlan sell his Oceanview home for about $1.45 million, and most of the sale proceeds went to Chase Bank for forbearance, and some to Brown, Quinlan said. A $100,000 lump sum went to McConville to compensate the company for Quinlan’s missed mortgage payments.
By 2023, there was little interest in the property, Brown said. (Quinlan expressed doubt that Brown had shown it.) The price dropped to $2.6 million as of September, per a real-estate listing, after Brown argued it was a more reasonable asking price. It didn’t help. On Tuesday, Quinlan called McConville’s lawyer outside the court gates to extend the foreclosure another six months, but the appeal was rejected.
Besides himself, a litany of workers and individuals associated with the project will lose out on money, Quinlan said. Additionally, Bernal Heights, a neighborhood that has built almost no new housing from 2010 to 2021, according to the San Francisco Chronicle, now has an entitled but undeveloped parcel of land with no new homes.
Quinlan, a former contractor and substitute teacher, said he thinks he must likely come out of retirement to pay for daily expenses, and take a few contracting gigs. He said he has moved to Watsonville, and York Street was his last tie to San Francisco.
Both Quinlan and Brown still believe the land is an attractive spot for housing, now having hammered out safe workarounds and city approval for the challenging site. “Why I stayed with it for 44 years is because it has great views of San Francisco,” Quinlan said.
“I believe the housing at 1513 will be built,” Quinlan wrote in a text to Brown, right before the foreclosure auction occurred.
“It might be developed,” Brown said on Tuesday. “But not by McConville, and not by me.”
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There is a lot missing from this article. I will be the first to admit that the development process in SF is byzantine, but some financial data would help. He paid $45K for the lot. It’s currently assessed at $193K, with the last tax bill of $2,273. So tax liens are not the issue. The only way it went into foreclosure with a minimum bid of $1.75M is that he used it as a piggy bank and took out loans against the property most likely totaling around $1.75M and the lender wants their money back. You borrow money against a property, don’t pay it back, and the bank takes the property.
He tried to sell it for $4M, then $3.5M, then $3M, then $2.6M. (Remember, he paid $45K for it long, long ago.) Bottom line, $400K per buildable unit at the original list price or even $260K per unit as of the current list price — just for the dirt is way more than it is worth. The lot is extremely difficult to build on — on a very steep hill with limited access and existing properties surrounding it. The site prep alone (leveling the lot, putting in drainage and retaining walls, mitigating impacts to the neighbors, bringing in utilities, etc. etc.) is enough to scare away most developers and would probably cost another couple million.
It’s a sad outcome for Patrick, but clearly he should have auctioned off the property in 2019 right after he got the entitlements and he shouldn’t have loaded up the property with so much debt. Probably could have sold for $1.5M to $2.0M or maybe more back in 2019. In today’s interest rate environment, probably less.
Yeah, he likely took out a ton of reverse mortgages on the property. He hadn’t started construction yet, and he bought this property decades ago for peanuts (relatively speaking), so the only explanation is that he borrowed against this property. I guess that now that the property has been foreclosed, he’ll get the surplus proceeds, unless his reverse mortgage is so high that he’ll get nothing. Considering the sale of his Oceanview Home also netted him nothing (he was in forbearance to Chase Bank), and that he paid $100k to the lender for the Bernal Heights lot and was still delinquent, he probably used the reverse mortgage to buy property elsewhere and perhaps even fund the “soft costs” for the duplex development (architects, lawyers, etc.). He did say he owns a house in Watsonville so perhaps he bought that house with the reverse mortgage. Hopefully this property gets built on soon.
Yes, and the fact that he couldn’t afford to pay the mortgage on a property he owned for 44 years suggests there is more to this story we’re not hearing.
The site is not as complex as you make it sound. There are utilities readily available to expand off York. NIMBY Neighbors who enjoyed the bonus green space were main drivers of delay and failure agree he should have unloaded in 2019. Outcome would be very different
Thanks for the analysis! Very helpful.
LOL, building housing on Bernal. Since the 1990s, Bernal has been the aerie of of the progressive grandees. Ammiano, Redmond, Campos and their allies were Bernal homeowners. Ronen was elevated into the club in 2018, somehow acquiring a TIC unit off of Cortland at the height of the real estate market, and departing the Mission.
The main theme of the past 20 yr of progressive Bernal dominance over the Mission has been to ensure that all “undesirable” matters that impact D9 are contained in the Mission flats. This is one reason why Campos lost to Haney in D9–we’d seen the “work.”
Thus, we’re not going to see any affordable housing built in Bernal, no poverty social services, substance or psych treatment facilities and most certainly no “safe consumption sites” anywhere nearby.
As far as Quinlan goes, financing one’s retirement at his age on real estate speculation was a reach, stretching way into the risk zone.
Socketsite has been covering this property and it’s proposed infill project for the last year or so: https://socketsite.com/archives/tag/1513-york-street
I am so sorry because of the red tapes and the neighborhood rules, and it ends up this way
I know Mr. Quinlan and he is a nice person
I believe this was the project that would open up the center backyards on a steep hill for housing development that did not appear to have sufficient access for the number of units. If he wanted to build, he could have built less units without so much fuss. But, I am sorry for his loss.