Looks like San Fran is slowly getting rid of businesses and converting to more housing. Of course, those living in the new housing will have to work outside the city. In this case a major building will be converted to housing.
“The longtime headquarters of Wells Fargo on Montgomery Street may become a residential building as a developer already working on office conversions in SF is reportedly close to buying the property.
A developer that already has a downtown office-to-residential conversion under construction, Forge Development Partners, is reportedly close to inking a deal to buy 420 Montgomery Street, the longtime corporate headquarters of Wells Fargo. The company announced plans in early December to sell the 409,000-square-foot building, which also housed the Wells Fargo Museum. The museum subsequently closed in February.
Constructions jobs will be created—tech and other jobs are leaving town. In the long run, San Fran will become the Detroit of the 1990’s—dead.
Developer of Office-to-Residential Conversions In Talks to Buy Downtown SF Wells Fargo Building
SF1ST, 4/15/25 https://sfist.com/2025/04/16/developer-of-office-to-residential-conversions-in-talks-to-acquire/
The longtime headquarters of Wells Fargo on Montgomery Street may become a residential building as a developer already working on office conversions in SF is reportedly close to buying the property.
A developer that already has a downtown office-to-residential conversion under construction, Forge Development Partners, is reportedly close to inking a deal to buy 420 Montgomery Street, the longtime corporate headquarters of Wells Fargo. The company announced plans in early December to sell the 409,000-square-foot building, which also housed the Wells Fargo Museum. The museum subsequently closed in February.
The SF Business Times reports that Forge Development is “expected to acquire the building for roughly $54 million, or in the range of $135 per square foot,” but the deal has not closed and details have not been shared.
Forge is already at work converting a building a few blocks away, the Humboldt Bank Building at 785 Market Street. As SFist reported last year, that 19-story building, constructed in 1906, is expected to reopen sometime this year as a 120-unit apartment building.
The CEO of Forge, architect and developer Richard Hannum, called that building at the time the “poster child for conversions” because of how solidly it was constructed — right after the 1906 earthquake and fire — and because its floorplates a narrow with plenty of windows, from an era when offices needed to make the most of natural light.
The T-shaped 420 Montgomery Street, by comparison, has fairly deep floorplates, according to the Business Times, which could make a conversion challenging. It’s not clear how many units it might yield, but it could become SF’s largest conversion to date.
Wells Fargo’s original headquarters was up the street at 30 Montgomery Street, and they moved to this building in 1962. The company revealed plans in December to relocate its corporate headquarters to 333 Market Street, where it already has offices — and while this might still be the company’s symbolic home, much of the bank’s corporate leadership is based in New York. Wells Fargo was founded in Golde Rush-era San Francisco, in 1852.
As the Business Times notes, Forge is an outlier in plowing ahead with office-to-residential conversions, given that such projects don’t easily pencil given currently high construction costs.
785 Market Street is the first and only office-to-residential conversion to get underway since the pandemic, despite much talk about such projects as potential saviors for SF’s beleaguered downtown. The only other approved conversion project, the Warfield Building, was called off and the building was sold in February to become a new arts and culture hub.
Forge Development previously completed a new-construction, 240-unit rental-apartment project in the Tenderloin, TL Residences at 361 Turk/145 Leavenworth.
