San Francisco Gives Go-Ahead for Construction of City’s Tallest Residential Building

A rendering of the new residential tower project at 530 Howard.Courtesy of Pickard Chilton

San Francisco is getting a new residential high-rise downtown. The new tower will stand in the city’s South of Market neighborhood, about two blocks from Salesforce Tower.

In an email to The Epoch Times on Nov. 4, a spokesperson for the San Francisco Planning Commission said, “The proposed project proposes to demolish the existing office building at 530 Howard Street and surface parking lot at 524 Howard Street and construct a new 72-story, approximately 795-foot, residential building.”

The living area will span about 818,922 square feet consisting of 672 units.

There will be three levels of garage parking, 149 off-street parking spaces, and over 400 bicycle parking spaces. A pedestrian bridge is planned to connect the building at Level 5 with the Salesforce Transit Center Park, giving public access from a public elevator on Natoma Street.

“While we have approvals, we have not set a date for construction start,” Julie Chase, spokesperson for the project, told The Epoch Times in an email on Nov. 5.

Another high rise that stands in the same neighborhood and right next to Salesforce Tower is the Millennium Tower, which has had tilting and sinking problems in recent years.

The luxury residential building opened in 2009 but had sunk 16 inches into soft soil and landfill by 2016. This caused the building to tilt at its base and lean 6 inches at the top. Residents sued the developer and designers. The settlement included spending $100 million to install concrete piles to anchor the building’s foundation.

When The Epoch Times asked about how the public would be reassured about the new high rise, Chase said, “We cannot opine on Millenium as that property had a unique set of circumstances and is not adjacent to us or impacts our project.”

The Epoch Times also reached out to the architects for the project.

Gov. Gavin Newsom in 2022 signed AB 2011 into law, which went into effect in July 2023, to create more affordable housing. It allowed permits for residential sites on places currently zoned for commercial or retail uses.

In June 2023, San Francisco announced a new Request For Interest to promote the conversion of underutilized office buildings for other uses.

Those conversions are also called “adaptive reuse” projects and are part of Mayor London Breed’s plan Roadmap to San Francisco’s Future, with a goal to have at least 30,000 new residents downtown by 2030.