San Francisco and the Bay Area have themselves become emblematic of this paradoxical condition. It all feels like something out of a dystopian movie.īecause of its structural problems, the Millennium Tower has attracted media attention around the world, but it has also become an all-too-apt metaphor for the state of contemporary American society and economy: an imposing edifice, still the envy of the world, but resting on sinking ground. Trash blows through the desolate streets like tumbleweed. In a neighborhood transformed by the Bay Area’s tech boom, where Salesforce built its tallest-in-the-city tower, there are now vacant offices, empty restaurants, and shuttered storefronts. In the shadow of the tower, people pitch tents of tarp and cardboard, makeshift dwellings that add to the bleakness that overcame the city’s Financial District during the pandemic. Costly attempts have been made to reinforce the foundation with metal pilings, and a web of lawsuits has been filed to recoup investment losses. Drop a marble on the floor of its $13 million penthouse, and within seconds it will roll toward the northwest wall. At its highest point, 58 stories above ground, one corner of the building is already 27 inches lower than the other. Ever since the luxury apartment tower was built in 2009, the bedrock on which it rests has been slowly sinking, nearly an inch each year. Things come up like that and you just go ahead and fix it….it could have been fixed, but it wasn't.The Millennium Tower in downtown San Francisco is leaning. “$4 million more is not enough to be consequential,” Cauthen said. Today, Cauthen still can’t understand what happened, given that the sum involved was so small, comparatively. “They chose not to spend the money,” she said, according to the transcript of her testimony. “My understanding was that there was no money to pay for it,” he said, according to the deposition transcript, which NBC Bay Area’s Investigative Unit obtained along with thousands of other pages of depositions in the now-settled Millennium litigation.Įven if there had been the money, then Transbay head Maria Ayerdi-Kaplan testified in her 2019 deposition that the agency considered it the “developer's responsibility to pay for the design and construction of their for-profit development, not the public taxpayer.”Īyerdi-Kaplan, who has never publicly commented on what happened with the Millennium Tower during her tenure, testified that it was her understanding that the Millennium developers had even refused to hire a geotechnical consultant on the project, let alone pay to take their tower to bedrock. In fact, both the Millennium and Natoma projects had the same geotechnical firm responsible for their foundations.īut when it came to extending the Natoma offer to Millennium, Koutsoftas recalled in his deposition, it was a “moot” point. But in his testimony as part of post-Millennium construction litigation, he said it was widely understood at the time that the $350 million Millennium project was not going to be built to bedrock, despite the risk that halted the Natoma project. He did not respond to requests for comment for this story. A Transbay consulting engineer estimated extending to bedrock with steel piles would cost about $4 million.īut after the developer balked, saying there was no time to do that, the city halted the project and it was never built.ĭemetrious Koutsoftas, Transbay’s geotechnical consultant, had drawn up the $4 million estimate in the Natoma project. Records show that Transbay offered to pay the developer the cost to extend piles down to bedrock. The concern was that the 80 Natoma Street tower, a heavy concrete building like the Millennium tower, would sink into the train complex planned to run beneath it. But that was not always an easy sell.Īccording to Cauthen, Transbay struggled to get the developer of a tower slated to be built atop land Transbay wanted to use for its underground project, to build down to bedrock. Given the risk Cauthen said he figured that those projects would all build to bedrock, given the risk that the structures could settle into ancient Bay mud. Sign up for NBC Bay Area’s Housing Deconstructed newsletter. Get a weekly recap of the latest San Francisco Bay Area housing news.
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