“The penthouse speaks to the quality of the building and represents a significant price for a beautiful condominium,” said Elmets. It also has a large terrace and a 6,000-pound sculpture made out of thin shards of glass.ĭoug Elmets, spokesperson for the Millennium Tower Homeowners Association, said the owners in the building will be paying close attention to what happens with the unit. The two-bedroom penthouse - with views of both the Golden Gate and Bay bridges - has a 3,500-square-foot “great room” with an “orchestra ceiling” engineered to evenly disperse music throughout. “Since the market correction began about a year ago, the condo market has been much weaker and in particular it’s been much, much weaker in downtown areas,” said Carlisle.Īlready, a litmus test of the Millennium’s post-fix future emerged this week with the news that the tower’s most famous unit, the 5,000-square-foot penthouse once belonging to the late venture capitalist Tom Perkins, has hit the market for $14 million. In the first four months of 2023, sales of condos over $2 million in San Francisco were down 64% from the same period last year, according to Patrick Carlisle, who heads up research in Northern California for the brokerage Compass. The once-soaring downtown condo market has crashed. Then there is the state of San Francisco’s downtown - the vacant office buildings, boarded up retail and visible homeless encampments - an area that was thriving when Millennium Tower’s structural issues emerged in 2016. Gabrielle Lurie/The Chronicleįor long-suffering owners of the tower’s 419 condos, the conclusion of the work not only represents the end of a difficult chapter in the building’s history, but also the start of a new one filled with uncertainty.īanks are still not lending on the building, meaning that buyers either need to pay all cash or get a private, high-interest “hard money” loan. “The substantive work to ensure the building remains stable without movement or tilting should be complete by the end of June,” he said.Ĭonstruction crews gather for a meeting at the Millennium Tower on Mission Street in February. Sotheby'sĪlready the sinking has stopped and the tilt has started to reverse, according to project engineer Ronald Hamburger of Simpson Gumpertz & Heger. Each pile - concrete-filled steel pipes 24 inches in diameter - has been driven 270 feet to bedrock and is designed to support 1 million pounds of weight, taking a total of 18 million pounds off the tower’s original foundation.Ī penthouse in the Millennium Tower is hitting the market as the retrofit work wraps up. To date, the construction team has installed 18 piles to underpin the building’s existing foundation and is now working to transfer the weight of the tower to the new piles. The association did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the Guardian.Once the symbol of excess and arrogance in a booming pre-pandemic San Francisco, the 58-story tower is in the final stretch of a $100 million engineering fix to arrest the building’s settlement and reversing the tilt that made it lean 24 inches to the west and 7.9 inches to the north. Shortly after work began, however, the sinking and tilting accelerated the building now has a tilt of 22 inches, NBC Bay Area reported.Ī spokesperson for the Millennium Tower Association told the San Francisco Chronicle that the building is safe, but that it would suspend work on the project out of caution while it works to better understand the issue. In May, crews started work on the perimeter pile upgrade project to install 52 concrete, 140,000lb piles to anchor the building to bedrock 250ft below ground. This is a one-of-a-kind situation we won’t ever see again in San Francisco.”Ī confidential settlement reached last year included a $100m plan to fix the building, and compensate homeowners in the building for estimated losses. “It will be a roadmap for other downtown developments for what to avoid. “This litigation exposed a lot of problems in the development of this particular building,” Niall McCarthy, an attorney representing a group of homeowners, told the Guardian in 2019. Photograph: Beck Diefenbach / Reuters/Reuters Pedestrians inspect cracks near the sinking Millennium tower in San Francisco in 2016.
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