Tall & Urban News

The proposed tower on Transbay Parcel F, in downtown San Francisco, has gone through a redesign that shaved off space and planned housing.

The developers pushing to build it will ask the San Francisco Planning Commission on 5 December 2019 to approve a series of changes to relevant zoning plans.

The tower, which is across the street from Salesforce Tower, and designed by the same firm, Pelli Clarke Pelli Architects, has been in the works for over three years, ever since real estate firm Hines, Goldman Sachs affiliate Broad Street, and Urban Pacific Development teamed up to buy the land for US$160 million in 2016.

In early 2018, the 64-story tower design called for 170 units of housing, but the package up for consideration at the hearing has cut that back to 165. The original plans for the project had 200 units.

The rest of the building has contracted, too. Previously there was the proposed hotel with 210 rooms, now it’s down to 189 rooms. The former 251,000 square feet (23,000 square meters) of office space has reduced to 240,000 square feet (22,000 square meters). Retail space has diminished from 9,000 square feet (840 square meters) to 8,700 square feet (810 square meters).

The pedestrian bridge to Salesforce Park remains in the design.

The amendments are mostly technical changes including swapping some height limits on neighboring plots and rezoning some parts of some lots to eliminate unevenness across the planned build site to create a “single, uniform zoning district.”

But since the request would mean making changes to the city’s general plan, the arduous process will run up the clock on the proposal.

Presently, nothing sits on the site. It was previously used to store equipment and other necessaries for the construction of Salesforce Tower and it was the last big plot of Transbay land that the city sold.

For more on this story, go to Curbed San Francisco.