Real Estate Values in Freefall at SF’s Millennium Tower
If you haven’t heard by now, San Francisco’s Millennium Tower is sinking and tilting. At 645 feet (minus too many inches), the infamous skyscraper is known worldwide as the Leaning Tower of San Francisco. The story broke in 2016 and became a saga of architectural hubris and prime example of the German buzzword Schadenfreude. In that regard, it’s a gift that keeps on giving. The saga continues today.
Critics initially cheered the crystalline behemoth. It earned numerous awards in its opening year, 2009, drawing millionaires and star athletes to the residence. Condos sold for up to three times their original price after their first flips. Ambitiously positioned in the middle of Techie SoMa, the Millennium Tower was a very big deal. It’s still a big deal, albeit for different reasons.
$100+ million for one mistake.
Millennium Partners built their namesake tower from 2005 to 2009 for a reported $350 million. In those four years, people in high places made terrible mistakes.
Choosing a concrete frame over a lighter steel frame is one example. Concrete-frame structures sink faster than their steel-boned counterparts in a process called subsidence. It’s why a smaller version of the Millennium Tower did not rise from a nearby lot. The issue isn’t the concrete frame but the material on which it stands, in this case: wet sand and clay.
Whoever wrote the Book of Matthew (no, really; we have no idea) ought to see this foolish tower built upon the sand. It’s not impossible to build a city on sand. All of Miami exists on a spit. What you need is bedrock. Even the mushy, marshy landfill that is most of SoMa has some, except it’s located three hundred feet down. If your building isn’t anchored to bedrock, you’ve wasted $350 million on a stick in the mud.
So we have a heavy concrete block more than 600 feet high, jammed into a gritty, sodden pit in the ground—without connecting to bedrock. Engineers expect a little subsidence to occur at any skyscraper, given how massive they get. But the rate of subsidence at the Millennium Tower far surpassed expectations, and by 2016, it had sunk more than one foot.
Not just the residents’ problem.
The Millennium Tower is a premium example of what happens when profit margins matter more than integrity, structural or otherwise. It’s all but confirmed by building residents that Millennium Partners cut costs in their for-profit project at 301 Mission. Cutting corners here freed up funds that already had a better purpose than lying inert in some millionaire’s bank account. They were meant to secure safety and quality of life for everyone in and around the building, residents and passers-by.
Instead we have a 58-story hazard to life and property leaning two feet over to the northwest on unstable land that is seismically active.
The sinking and tilting is not an isolated problem either. In fact the skyscraper has been plagued with difficulties ever since the issue became known. The sinking and tilting brings a host of other issues. Stress fractures en echelon streak the basement walls, allowing seepage to infiltrate the concrete, reminding many of the Surfside Condo collapse. The skyscraper’s precarious tilt—29 inches to the northwest by June 2023—is offsetting plumbing lines, causing sewage backups in some units. Ominously, in 2018, windows began spontaneously buckling.
Anchoring the tower in bedrock to begin with would’ve cost another $4 million, and yet the best explanation anyone can come up with is, “They chose not to spend the money.”
The Millennium Tower is literally more trouble than it’s worth.
The beleaguered tower is a catastrophe in spades. As external safety worries mount following a questionable fix at the building, internal values continue to freefall. A condo originally purchased for over a million dollars caught media attention for selling at half that rate. The mid-September sale acts as a temperature gauge for how poorly the building is performing on the market. If the skyscraper isn’t a net loss, which it certainly is, it’s a financial loss for anyone living there.
I’ve no pity for millionaires that didn’t bother looking at San Francisco’s liquefaction hazard map. Just because a skyscraper is shiny and new doesn’t mean it was built properly. Then again, maybe Millennium Tower is symptomatic of a greater threat looming over all of California’s building stock. Current state codes only require that a building not collapse on its occupants in an earthquake. That’s it, a harsh and unfriendly minimum. Your home may not collapse, but a quake can render it totally uninhabitable and the builders won’t face any consequences. We are building for a loss, and that affects us all, rich and poor.
As for the Millennium Tower, $500 million could be spent on shoring it up before all is said and done. It begs the question, How much to tear it down?
And can we get it done before an earthquake does it for us?
Howdy! My name is Katy Atchison and I'm an Associate Editor for Broke-Ass Stuart.
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