The Millennium Tower rises 645 feet above San Francisco’s South of Market neighborhood. Umm, make that 643 feet 8 inches. Since the building opened in 2009, it has sunk sixteen inches. Oh, and it’s tilting two inches at its base – fifteen inches at the top… so far. Anchoring it to compressed sand eighty feet below ground instead of bedrock a hundred feet deeper may not have been such a good idea. Owners of the 400 luxury condominiums – local hero Joe Montana is one – have filed a class-action suit against the developers. Of course the developers point the cause of the problem somewhere else: excavation for the adjacent Transbay Transit Center.
Along with the building itself, values of the residences are sinking: the asking price of a one-bedroom unit was recently slashed from $3.8 million to $3.6 million. So far there are no takers.
One would think that a lesson could have been learned from the last big quake that hit the bay area and mentioned something about liquefying soil in that region. Makes me visualize skyscrapers toppling like dominos when this boondoggle goes over.