Photos show how San Francisco's new buildings built in the last decade have permanently changed the city

Katie Canales

Dec 11, 2019, 22:54 IST

Photos show how San Francisco's new buildings built in the last decade have permanently changed the city

George Rose/Getty Images/Katie Canales/Business Insider

Many of the city skyline's newest additions are ultra-luxe condo projects and towering tech office buildings.

San Francisco's skyline and cityscape have become a bit more crowded in the past decade.
Salesforce Tower, the mixed-use high-rise at 181 Fremont, the infamously sinking Millennium Tower, the Golden State Warriors' Chase Center, and the city's $2.2 billion Salesforce Transit Center are just some of the new developments built in the past decade.
Here's how they've impacted the city.
Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

San Francisco saw a number of new buildings this past decade - and most are linked to the region's tech boom.

A 2013 photo of the city's skyline is void of Salesforce Tower's imposing figure. In 2019, it stands high and proud well above the well-known Transamerica Pyramid, beating out the 50-year-old building as the city's highest building.

And other additions to the city, like ultra-luxury condo high-rises and a $1.4 billion world-class sports center backed by Silicon Valley tech money, show just how integrated big tech has become into the fabric of the cityscape and its infrastructure.

Unsurprisingly, most of the buildings on this list are in the city's East Cut neighborhood. This is where a high concentration of condo high-rises and tech offices -like Salesforce, Facebook, Google, and Slack - have set up shop. The neighborhood also sits within District 6, a district that has seen 60% of the city's housing development in the past decade amidst San Francisco's notoriously stringent zoning restrictions.

Here's how some of the buildings built in the last decade have impacted San Francisco.

It's difficult not to start off with San Francisco's $1 billion Salesforce Tower. The imposing tower makes quite a statement in the skyline.

Construction on the tower in the heart of downtown commenced in 2013.

When it was finished in 2017, it beat San Francisco's beloved Transamerica Pyramid Building as the tallest building in the city.

It was originally named Transbay Tower, after the neighborhood's name at the time, but cloud computing giant Salesforce bought the naming rights as part of a real estate deal with developer Boston Properties.

The company will pay nearly $560 million over the course of 15 years to lease 30 floors in the building, which will serve as the 20-year-old company's global headquarters.

CEO Marc Benioff's decision to plant the company's "vertical village" in San Francisco was unusual compared to other tech giants at the time building campuses in the valley south of the city.

Silicon Valley proper’s long-time players, like Facebook and Google, have since expanded with offices in the heart of San Francisco, not far away from Salesforce Tower.

But back then, Twitter and Uber were among the only big tech companies with HQ's in the city. Neither of them, however, have quite the same presence that Salesforce's tower does.

An LED light installation wraps the crown of the tower, though what is displayed on it nightly is always somewhat difficult to make out.

But the company did appease the masses on Halloween 2018, when an online petition begged Benioff to turn the light display into the eye of Sauron from "The Lord of the Rings."

On the other hand, some have compared the tower in less favorable terms. As The New York Times wrote, "the tower is not beautiful, but is impossible to ignore."

But, as Curbed writes, the city was also not in favor of the Transamerica Pyramid when it was built in 1972. And now it's one of the most iconic sights in San Francisco. So there's hope for Salesforce Tower.

The high-rise was built alongside what was once the original Transbay Terminal.

It's since been demolished, and in its place is a new, $2.2 billion transportation hub, originally christened Transbay Terminal until Salesforce bought the naming rights. It was a project almost two decades in the making.

The Salesforce Transit Center was designed to serve as a more centralized location for local transportation, where commuters from the East Bay, the valley, and beyond could easily zip into the city's downtown area.

The structure's white latticed encasement is one of the most recognizable sights in downtown.

It officially opened in September 2018, along with a sprawling, lush rooftop park that's open to the public, with walkways, seating areas, and some cafes.

There are eleven bus lines running through the station on a third-story level. The project included a bridge designed to more easily ferry buses in from the highway, an issue that has plagued transportation in the part of town for years.

But it hasn't been smooth sailing for the four-block-long center and its rooftop park.

Just six weeks after its grand opening in September 2018, workers discovered two cracked steel beams in the center’s third-floor bus deck.

The center, the park, and its bus lines closed while repairs and reinforcement were made to the cracked load-bearing beams.

The transit center and bus service officially reopened in July 2019. Anyone can breeze on up to the beautiful rooftop park once again.

From the rooftop park, you can see a glass high-rise encased in white beams.

This is the tower at 181 Fremont, whose sole commercial tenant is Facebook.

The top half of the tower consists of 55 multi-million-dollar residences, including a five-bedroom $42 million penthouse.

The first condo sold for $15 million in August 2018, breaking the city's record for the highest-price-per-square-foot sale for a condo.

Meaning that there's a market for the city's spate of ultra-luxe condo skyscrapers. And 181 Fremont is only one example of these kinds of projects.

Another is the Millennium Tower, though it has had a rockier track record.

The residential tower was completed in 2009, with residents moving in starting in 2010.

But in 2015, residents learned that the building had sunk 16 inches and tilted 2 inches.

NBC Bay Area reported in July 2017 that about 50 residents said they were "stuck with nearly worthless condos."

A messy string of lawsuits was filed, but in August 2019, the lead attorney for residents in the building told the SF Examiner that a settlement had been reached, though there aren't many public details regarding it.

But one solution may see the light of day — a $100 million proposal is being considered that suggests installing concrete piles that will redistribute the tower's weight to bedrock instead of its existing foundation.

Luxury condo high-rises and office skyscrapers aren’t the only notable additions to the city in the past decade. A bit south of downtown is San Francisco’s Mission Bay neighborhood.

This part of town is home to the UCSF Medical Center and Kaiser Permanente, an Oakland-based healthcare company.

But it's also now where the home stadium for the Golden State Warriors is. The venue's financing is unlike others in the modern sports era in that Chase Center was funded privately.

The sports team poured $1.4 billion into the Chase Center project without any financial support from the city of San Francisco. Construction broke ground in 2017.

But that doesn't mean the Golden State Warriors will buckle under the costs — the Silicon Valley elite of the region's booming tech market will ensure they don't.

The team has $2 billion under contract from a cluster of founding partners, including tech giants like Adobe, Oracle, Google Cloud, Accenture, and, of course, JPMorgan Chase, which shelled out a reported $300 million to snag the naming rights to the stadium for 20 years.

According to Reuters, the Warriors' president, Rick Welts, also said the Chase Center development would not have panned out without the revenue generated from the office space that was built as part of the project. Uber is set to occupy much of that space.

Welts, the Warriors' president, told the media during a tour of the new arena in August 2019 that over time the Chase Center's biggest contribution to the city would be the entertainment aspect of the facilities.

So Chase Center will not only serve as a luxurious sports arena experience but will also host concerts and other performances.

Next Story The new CEO at Sanofi just announced massive changes to the company. 6 slides reveal where the pharma giant is headed now.