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.
