Sleek and Stylish

New high-rise towers reshape San Francisco's skyline

By Robert Carlsen

While homebuilders across the country wring their hands over slumping housing starts, developers in San Francisco are applauding the anticipated sellout of at least two of three major residential high-rise buildings now under construction.

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These three projects - One Rincon Hill, The Infinity and Millennium Tower - are kicking off the redevelopment and reimagination of two neighboring neighborhoods south of Market Street - Rincon Hill and the Transbay Terminal.

The Rincon Hill Plan, adopted by the Board of Supervisors and signed by Mayor Gavin Newsom in August 2005, envisions housing for as many as 20,000 new residents, retail shops and neighborhood services along Folsom Street; and transforming Main, Beale and Spear streets into "traffic-calmed, landscaped residential streets lined with town homes and front doors."



The first of the new Rincon developments is the two-tower One Rincon Hill project, which is being built by Bovis Lend Lease with a design by Chicago's Solon Cordwell Buenz & Associates. The first phase is the taller tower, 62 stories (the other is 45 stories); the entire project is expected to cost about $270 million.


Attached to the first, southern tower will be a podium parking garage surrounded by town homes. The town homes will be two-stories from the ground floor and three stories on top with their own elevators. An interior park and pool will flesh out the podium building.

Mike Kriozere, principal for the project's developer, San Diego's Urban West Associates, boasted that 90 percent of the south tower's 390 units were sold within the first two weeks of coming on the market in January.

"With a high-end product, that is usually the case, and San Francisco is a city of high-end buyers," Kriozere adds.

Units remaining range from $600,000 to $1.2 million; the 14 town homes around the south tower podium start at $1.4 million.

Kriozere says construction on the north tower and adjacent podium buildings will start before the south tower is complete in early 2008.

John Lahey, president of Solon Cordwell Buenz & Associates and principal in charge of One Rincon Hill, says his firm's experience with tall buildings, both in his hometown of Chicago and elsewhere in the country, made it a natural to create what the Rincon Hill Plan requires as "tall, slender and well-spaced buildings."

"The main issues with highrises in San Francisco revolve around seismic needs," Lahey says. "It's a big design factor."

Working with structural engineer Magnusson Klemencic Associates of Seattle, Bovis and SCB are introducing a technology that functions to reduce sway from earthquakes and strong winds. One Rincon Hill is the first building in the country to feature a tuned liquid damper system, which is a water tank at the top of the building.

Lahey says the design also utilizes outriggers that allow large openings and maximum glass for every unit. "From every unit, you can look straight down with no obstructions in the frame," he adds.

Lahey says his firm's experience also helped in developing an urban ambience to the project.

In following the neighborhood's design plan, "we wanted to do something on the urban level that interacts with the street … a simple, easily recognizable form, elegant and vertical," he adds.

Lahey says SCB is opening an office in San Francisco and hopes to work on more buildings like One Rincon Hill.

The Infinity is also within the Rincon Hill Plan, and Carl Shannon, managing director of developer Tishman Speyer, says sales are "far in excess in what we anticipated at this point."
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The 656-unit Infinity project is nearing completion of its first of two planned towers going up in two phases. The first-phase, 37-story tower features 237 units, and the project also includes eight- and nine-story adjacent podium buildings with 120 units and amenities.

This 1,736-acre mixed-use development at 300 Spear Street, down the hill from One Rincon Hill, will also have a 41-story tower.

Webcor Builders is the general contractor. The architects include Heller Manus of San Francisco and Arquitectonica of Miami.

"We're thrilled at the number of units sold so far and the pricing we've been able to achieve," Shannon says. "We've been selling six to seven units per week now, and we even recently raised prices."

Shannon, like Lahey, equates the popularity of the high-rise units to wealthy people looking to buy maybe a second, or third, home. "San Francisco is an incredibly desirable place to live," he says.

The few units remaining for sale range from studios at $595,000 to three-bedrooms at $1.065 million.

(It's also important to note that both these Rincon project developers have paid the city tens of millions of dollars to offset the city's requirement for a percentage of affordable units made available in every new project. The city in return is using the money to fund affordable-only projects in needy areas.)

Meanwhile, the mayor and city are putting a lot of emphasis on the Transbay Transit Center redevelopment project. Plans call for high-rise residential and commercial space surrounding a new transit facility, which will accommodate light rail, Caltrain and local and regional transit buses.

"The city and the region badly need new housing close to jobs and transportation as an alternative to suburban sprawl," says Marcia Rosen, executive director of the city's Redevelopment Agency. "The new high-density, transit-oriented development in the Transbay Redevelopment Project Area will include six new residential highrises that will address the city's housing needs in a balanced, livable neighborhood with towers far enough apart to allow sunlight and open space in the new neighborhood, and controls to ensure that ground-floor space is activated.

"This new residential neighborhood will be a mixed-income neighborhood, with 35 percent of the new housing units permanently affordable for low and moderate income households."

The first of the projects is the Millennium Tower at Mission between Fremont and Beale streets, across from the current Transbay Terminal facility.

Scheduled for a late 2008 completion, the $400 million building rises 58 stories and features 420 one-, two- and three-bedroom units plus two penthouses. The Millennium also features a two-story glass atrium, 8,000 sq ft of retail, a five-level underground parking garage and enclosed pool and spa area.

The developer of the Millennium Tower is New York-based Millennium Partners. The general contractor is Webcor Builders, and the architect is Handel Architects.

"Similar to the making of the Four Seasons on Market Street, Millennium Tower will change the face of the Tranbay Terminal for the better," says Glenn Rescalvo, partner and project architect for Handel Architects.

"It will bring luxury living to part of San Francisco that even born and raised San Franciscan couldn't have imagined."

Rescalvo says the Millennium Tower is also critical in making an urban connection between what his firm refers to as the financial district to the newly developed Rincon Hill area.

"This project will start the 24/7 lifestyle that is desperately needed in the part of San Francisco," he adds. "It will bring more commerce, more pedestrians and revitalize this district."

To further the redevelopment and get some buzz going, the city is sponsoring an international design competition for the new transit center itself and an adjacent mixed-use high-rise.

A number of local and regional architectural firms are interested in this project, including Skidmore Owings & Merrill, SMWM and Heller/Manus. Even famed architect Renzo Piano has a team involved.

The two-stage competition is expected to take a total of 36 months, with the winning team announced in August.

The first phase of the project begins with the building of the temporary terminal, commencing in 2008, to serve passengers while the new Transit Center is under construction. Construction of the new Transit Center and complementary Transit Tower is scheduled to begin in 2010 and be completed in 2014.

This first phase of the project includes design and construction of the Transit Center building, the rail foundation, bus ramps, and bus storage facilities, and design of the underground rail level component of the Transit Center.

The second phase of the project, the construction of the Caltrain Downtown Rail Extension, is estimated to begin in 2012 and be completed and operational by 2018, or earlier, if funding allows.

The project's capital cost is estimated at $3.4 billion.

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