Some people just love to lose money. In San Fran commercial buildings are being sold at 20% of the former values. These are ways to be broke, own or buy in San Fran. But, there are some who love to take big risks.
“Professing faith in both San Francisco’s luxury office market and a wider downtown recovery, executives with Related California are pushing ahead with ambitious plans for a $750 million, 41-story luxury office-and-hotel tower development in The City’s north Financial District.
The project, which is being co-sponsored by The City, would demolish an aging fire station at the corner of Sansome and Washington streets. It would deliver, free of charge to San Francisco, a new $40 million firehouse on the other side of the block, which is located between the Transamerica Pyramid and One Maritime Plaza.
This is being “co-sponsored” by the City. In other words the taxpayers are helping finance this. Is this why the City has a massive deficit, it has become a developer/speculator—using tax dollars meant for public safety, firefighters, potholes, homeless and even finance illegal aliens! This is what I call soft core corruption.
Developer pushes luxury downtown SF office-hotel tower plan
By Patrick Hoge, SF Examiner, 3/10/25 https://www.sfexaminer.com/news/the-city/related-california-places-huge-bet-on-downtown-sf-recovery/article_d8d84dd8-fe06-11ef-921b-632dd546c3b9.html
Professing faith in both San Francisco’s luxury office market and a wider downtown recovery, executives with Related California are pushing ahead with ambitious plans for a $750 million, 41-story luxury office-and-hotel tower development in The City’s north Financial District.
The project, which is being co-sponsored by The City, would demolish an aging fire station at the corner of Sansome and Washington streets. It would deliver, free of charge to San Francisco, a new $40 million firehouse on the other side of the block, which is located between the Transamerica Pyramid and One Maritime Plaza.
“We believe this is one of the best locations in The City for the best office building,” said Gino Canori, president of Related California, which is a subsidiary of the national real estate titan Related Companies.
A rendering of the proposed 41-story luxury office and hotel tower that Related California is proposing to build at 530 Sansome Street in the north Financial district.
Related California, which hopes to start construction in 2027 and finish by 2030, is charging ahead even though since the onset of COVID-19 city office vacancy rates have been very high and the local hotel market has yet to recover fully.
Despite such dour indicators, company officials say demand for the highest-quality office spaces with views is actually very high. They contend their tower’s offices, all on upper floors and featuring 11-foot tall windows, will offer vista galore across the Northern Waterfront’s low-slung neighborhoods to the Golden Gate Bridge and beyond, as well as east toward the Bay Bridge.
Related California has taken drone photographs to let people see the sweeping views from aloft, said Nicholas Vanderboom, Related California’s chief operating officer. He provided data showing the vacancy rate in Class AA offices with views at 6.9%, versus 36.7% for the market as a whole.
The proposal for 530 Sansome St. is thus “a very contrarian bet, but it’s not one based on a whim,” said Matthew Witte, the company’s executive vice president of acquisitions and development.
San Francisco has among the oldest office stocks of any major metropolitan city in the country, with many buildings from the 1950s and 1960s that are “really quite outdated,” Witte said. He noted that’s particularly true north of Market Street, where many of the buildings are even older. There has been a similar paucity of new top-tier hotels, he said
Related California’s hotel and office project would thus satisfy strong demand for premium office space that is in short supply, Witte said.
Top-tier companies around the country want to provide employees with enjoyable places to work, in part to incentivize people to come to offices, said Witte, who used words like “bespoke” and “hospitality-oriented” to describe the Sansome Street plans.
Witte cited the example of The Cove, a $20 million center under development at 525 Market St. that promises to offer coworking space and other “hospitality services” for building tenants.
“What everybody wants is to get their employees back in the office. Landlords want it. The City wants it, the companies want it, and you’ve got to make it attractive,” Witte said.
Related California is also banking on the growing popularity of the nearby Jackson Square neighborhood, an area filled with historic buildings that has been increasingly popular with venture capitalists and tech companies, among others.
Another attraction is the neighboring Transamerica Pyramid complex just across Sansome Street with its redwood grove accessible on foot via Mark Twain Street. Transamerica’s owner recently completed a $250 million renovation of the property, including the tower and grounds.
Related’s proposal calls for converting all of Merchant Street between Battery and Sansome streets into privately owned public open space and using landscaping and other elements to create continuity with the Transamerica complex.
Related California previously in 2021 won city approval to build a roughly 200-foot tall, mixed-use hotel and office tower at 530 Sansome with a roughly 200-room hotel, a fitness club, office space and a ground-floor restaurant, among other amenities. That plan called for a new fire station in the base of the structure.
