SAN FRANCISCO ALERT! They Spent $100M to Save This Sinking Tower — It Leaned Even More

Added: 2026-06-02

[00:00:00]In the summer of 2021, a repair crew was drilling into the sidewalk outside one of the most expensive residential towers in San Francisco history. They were not building something new.

[00:00:12]They were trying to stop a building that had already cost $550 million to construct from continuing to sink into the ground. The monitors were running.

[00:00:21]The engineers were watching.

[00:00:23]And then the numbers moved, not in the right direction. The building was sinking faster. The $100 million fix was making it worse.

[00:00:32]That is not a metaphor.

[00:00:34]That is what the monitoring data showed.

[00:00:37]By the time engineers halted construction that August, the 58-story Millennium Tower at 301 Mission Street had tilted 22 inches to the northwest.

[00:00:47]To understand what that means physically, imagine leaning a 645-foot building, roughly the height of a 58-story concrete and glass skyscraper, almost 2 feet off true vertical.

[00:01:00]Engineers had already warned that if the lean ever reached 40 inches, the elevators would likely stop functioning.

[00:01:07]The plumbing would follow.

[00:01:09]Some residents reported that plumbing problems had already begun.

[00:01:13]The building had been fully sold out.

[00:01:16]Every unit.

[00:01:17]419 residences, many purchased for millions of dollars, some for as much as $10 million.

[00:01:25]It had won architectural awards. It had attracted Joe Montana, Hunter Pence, and Tom Perkins. It had been approved, inspected, celebrated, and trusted by a system of professionals, regulators, and institutions whose entire job was to make sure something like this did not happen.

[00:01:44]And it had been sinking since before the first resident walked through the front door.

[00:01:48]This is not a story about a building that collapsed. It is a story about a building that did something more complicated and more expensive than collapse.

[00:01:58]It stood.

[00:01:59]It sold.

[00:02:01]It leaned.

[00:02:02]And then the people who owned it spent years trying to understand how a legal, approved, fully occupied luxury skyscraper could become one of the most documented real estate disasters in American history.

[00:02:16]To understand the disaster, you have to understand the promise.

[00:02:20]And to understand the promise, you have to go back to San Francisco in the early 2000s, when the South of Market neighborhood was still becoming something.

[00:02:29]SoMa was close to the financial district, close to the waterfront, close to where the money was moving.

[00:02:35]The city was building upward and outward, betting on its own growth, and developers were looking at parcels that had once seemed unglamorous and seeing something different.

[00:02:45]Millennium Partners saw the corner of Mission and Fremont streets, and saw the opportunity to build a landmark.

[00:02:51]The plan was a 58-story concrete and glass tower, 645 ft tall, the tallest residential building west of the Mississippi River at the time of its construction. [music] The project would cost approximately $550 million.

[00:03:06]There would be 419 units, some marketed as residences, >> [music] >> the upper floors as grand residences. On the ground floor, a five-star restaurant held by Michael Mina.

[00:03:17]Inside a 22,000 sq ft private owner's club with a fitness center, a wine cellar, and a full concierge.

[00:03:25]Floor-to-ceiling glass.

[00:03:27]360° views of the bay, the bridges, the city.

[00:03:32]The building opened in April 2009.

[00:03:35]It sold out.

[00:03:36]Condos flipped for two and three times their original purchase prices in the early years.

[00:03:41]The penthouse eventually changed hands for $13 million.

[00:03:46]The city approved the permits.

[00:03:48]Engineers reviewed the structural design.

[00:03:51]Marketing language spoke of permanence, exclusivity, and distinction.

[00:03:55]Architecture critics praised the project. The buyers were not reckless people.

[00:04:00]They were buying into a system that looked complete, permits, inspections, professional reviews, and a city that had signed off on every phase.

[00:04:09]That is what made what happened next so difficult to absorb.

[00:04:13]Underneath the building, the ground was not what the original model said it would be.

[00:04:18]This is the part that requires a short geography lesson. Because San Francisco's soil is genuinely unusual and consequential.

[00:04:27]Much of the financial district in SoMa sits on landfill.

[00:04:31]Material dumped into the bay over the 19th and 20th centuries [music] to create buildable land where the bay once was.

[00:04:39]Beneath the landfill is soft compressible clay.

[00:04:42]Beneath the clay is a layer of dense sand.

[00:04:45]Beneath the sand, finally, is bedrock.

[00:04:48]But bedrock in this part of San Francisco begins roughly 200 ft below street level.

[00:04:54]The Millennium Tower's original foundation used approximately 950 to 990 pre-stressed concrete piles driven between 60 and 90 ft into the ground.

[00:05:04]>> [music] >> They reached the dense sand layer.

[00:05:07]They did not reach bedrock.

[00:05:09]These are called friction piles.

[00:05:11]They hold the building in place not by sitting on something solid, but by relying on the grip between the pile surface and the surrounding soil.

[00:05:21]Think of pressing a flag pole into wet sand rather than anchoring it in concrete. The flag pole stands until the sand shifts, until the weight above becomes more than the grip below can hold.

[00:05:33]The initial geotechnical models predicted the building would settle between 4 and 6 in over its entire lifetime.

[00:05:40]That was the official number.

[00:05:43]The figure that engineers produced.

[00:05:45]That the project moved forward on. That buyers were implicitly trusting when they signed their purchase agreements.

[00:05:51]By the time construction finished in 2009, the building had already sunk nearly 10 inches. Before a single resident moved in at full occupancy, the Millennium Tower had exceeded its lifetime settlement prediction.

[00:06:05]And the sinking did not stop there.

[00:06:08]Monitoring continued after the building opened.

[00:06:11]The data was being collected. Settlement was being measured and tracked. Internal records would later become central to lawsuits alleging that the settlement rates far exceeded the legal threshold 1 inch per year that required disclosure to prospective [music] buyers. Whether that data was shared appropriately with people considering purchasing units became one of the defining legal questions of the case.

[00:06:35]The developer maintained a different position. Millennium Partners argued publicly in 2016 that friction pile foundations were the standard practice in San Francisco at the [music] time of construction.

[00:06:47]Founding partner Christopher Jeffries pointed out that the only buildings in the area that reached bedrock were four newer projects, all built on public agency land, all begun after the Millennium Tower was already complete.

[00:07:03]In that framing, the foundation choice was not an outlier. It was consistent with how downtown San Francisco had been built [music] for decades.

[00:07:11]That argument might have held if not for one complication.

[00:07:14]The Millennium Tower is a concrete building, which made it considerably heavier than steel frame alternatives of comparable size.

[00:07:23]According to statements later made by the Transbay Joint Powers Authority, the public agency building the adjacent Salesforce Transit Center, the building was as much as five times heavier than neighboring structures.

[00:07:35]That weight was resting on a foundation built for a load that, as the evidence accumulated, it could not [music] permanently support. Reports later noted that anchoring the original foundation into bedrock would have cost approximately $4 million more at the time of construction.

[00:07:52]The total project cost was $550 million.

[00:07:56]The additional cost to reach bedrock was less than 1% of the total.

[00:08:01]That number would become one of the most repeated figures in years of litigation.

[00:08:06]The public story broke in August 2016.

[00:08:10]Engineers retained by the homeowners association disclosed that the building had sunk between 16 and 18 in [music] and and was tilting 14 in to the northwest.

[00:08:20]This was not a projection.

[00:08:21]>> [music] >> It was measured, documented, undeniable.

[00:08:25]The consequences moved fast. In November 2016, San Francisco City [music] Attorney Dennis Herrera filed suit against Mission Street Development LLC, an affiliate of Millennium Partners, alleging the firm had knowingly concealed excessive sinking data from prospective condominium buyers in violation of California disclosure law.

[00:08:46]The complaint alleged that internal monitoring [music] data showed settlement rates far above the legal threshold for mandatory notification and that the concealment helped maintain sales momentum for units priced up to $10 million.

[00:08:59]Millennium Partners disputed the characterization. Individual unit owners and the homeowners association filed class action litigation separately alleging fraud and breach of fiduciary duty.

[00:09:11]The central claim was that the building had been marketed as stable.

[00:09:15]While geotechnical risks from its friction pile foundation were documented [music] internally, Millennium Partners responded by pointing at the Transbay Joint Powers Authority.

[00:09:25]The developer argued that the TJPA's massive excavation and dewatering project, which pumped hundreds of millions of gallons of ground water from the soil during construction of the adjacent transit center, had dropped the water table under the Millennium Tower by 20 ft. When the water level dropped, the saturated sand and clay below the foundation compressed, and the building sank faster, Jeffrey said at a press conference.

[00:09:51]There is only one issue here. TJPA's dewatering is the issue.

[00:09:56]The TJPA rejected the claim.

[00:09:58]The authority noted that by the time it's below ground work began in spring 2011, the Millennium Tower had already sunk 10 in, well before any dewatering occurred.

[00:10:09]Other nearby buildings had not shown similar problems.

[00:10:12]The TJPA's position was direct. The cause was the tower's inadequate foundation, and its extraordinary weight pressing down on compressible soil.

[00:10:23]Both positions were on the record simultaneously, and both had supporting data. The original foundation may have been undersized for the building's weight, and nearby construction activity may have accelerated what was already happening underneath it.

[00:10:37]That ambiguity is part of what made the litigation so enormous.

[00:10:41]More than 200 lawsuits were filed, and roughly 30 to 40 law firms became involved. Meanwhile, the physical consequences were no longer just numerical. Stress fractures were reported in the building's basement walls, with water seeping through the concrete.

[00:10:57]In 2018, windows began spontaneously buckling.

[00:11:01]Plumbing lines, offset by the building's growing lean, were reportedly causing sewage backups in some units.

[00:11:08]Banks stopped lending against units in the building.

[00:11:11]Buyers dried up. Residents who needed to sell discovered their apartments were nearly unsellable.

[00:11:17]The lawsuit had entered public record, which meant every future buyer, lender, and insurer could find it. The physical problem had become a financial problem, and the financial problem had become a reputational one.

[00:11:31]Reputation is harder to repair than pipes.

[00:11:34]In August 2019, a global settlement resolved more than 200 lawsuits involving over 400 individual parties.

[00:11:41]The terms were confidential. [music] The Transbay Joint Powers Authority, a public agency funded in part by California taxpayers, contributed $30 million publicly confirmed to the settlement. The full amount was larger, and the balance was sealed.

[00:11:57]With the legal resolution came the plan to fix the building.

[00:12:01]Engineer Ronald Hamburger of Simpson Gumpertz and Heger designed a system of 52 concrete perimeter piles, each drilled 250 ft down to bedrock along the north and west sides of the tower.

[00:12:12]The concept was described publicly as similar to putting a bumper jack beside a flat tire.

[00:12:18]Not a perfect fix, but a way to transfer a portion of the building's [music] weight from compressing sand directly onto solid rock.

[00:12:25]Halting further settlement, Shimmick Construction, a subsidiary of AECOM, began work [music] in late 2020.

[00:12:33]The cost was approximately $100 million funded by the settling parties and their insurers.

[00:12:39]The early months of the retrofit produced cautious optimism. Then came the summer of 2021.

[00:12:46]Internal engineering logs and emails, obtained by a local television investigation, showed that the building had begun sinking at an accelerated rate in May 2021.

[00:12:56]Construction continued for weeks after that acceleration was first detected.

[00:13:01]Engineers ultimately paused the work in August 2021 after the building had sunk an additional inch during the repair itself.

[00:13:09]Two causes were identified. First, the vibration from drilling the new perimeter piles was compressing the already unstable soil.

[00:13:18]Second, soil was being inadvertently removed as the piles were drilled.

[00:13:22]Unintentional excavation pulling material out from beneath the foundation the engineers were trying to stabilize.

[00:13:29]The fix was physically disrupting the ground it was supposed to protect.

[00:13:33]Geotechnical engineer Robert Pike, who had been a vocal critic of the retrofit plan before it began, stated publicly that the work should have been stopped months before it was. The engineers redesigned. The 52-pile plan was reduced to [music] 18 steel piles.

[00:13:49]The rationale was straightforward. Fewer piles meant less vibration, less soil disturbance, and therefore less additional sinking during the construction period itself. Hamburger stated that installing more piles would simply mean more settlement while construction was underway.

[00:14:06]The San Francisco Department of Building Inspection reviewed the revised plan and confirmed that the building remained within what it described as safe ranges.

[00:14:15]Work resumed.

[00:14:17]By 2023, the revised 18-pile retrofit was declared complete. Monitoring confirmed the sinking had stopped.

[00:14:26]Approximately 2 in of tilt had [music] been recovered. The building currently leans roughly 26 to 29 in to the northwest.

[00:14:34]Full correction to plumb, if it comes at all, is projected [music] to take approximately 40 years as the soil gradually equalizes beneath the new pile system.

[00:14:43]Every official position, reviewed in sequence, is defensible.

[00:14:47]Millennium Partners maintained the friction pile foundation was consistent with standard San Francisco practice at the time.

[00:14:55]The TJPA denied contributing to the sinking. The engineers maintained the revised retrofit achieved stabilization within acceptable parameters.

[00:15:05]The city approved the original [music] permits, the 52-pile plan, and the revised 18-pile plan.

[00:15:12]The Department of Building Inspection confirmed the building was safe at every stage.

[00:15:17]And the resale market has a different answer. As of 2024, the average resale loss at the Millennium Tower is over 20% below original purchase prices. One fifth floor unit sold at 52% loss.

[00:15:31]A unit purchased for roughly $1 million in 2014 resold for $615,000.

[00:15:39]Lenders refused to issue mortgages against [music] units in the building for years.

[00:15:43]Financing only began returning in limited form in 2024 and 2025.

[00:15:50]The homeowners association hired a public relations firm and launched a media campaign to reposition the building and attract buyers, lenders, and insurers.

[00:16:00]And then there is the penthouse.

[00:16:02]5,500 square feet at the top of 301 Mission Street. Floor-to-ceiling glass on every side.

[00:16:10]Views of the bay, the bridges, the hills, the city that sold itself as the future and built towers to prove it.

[00:16:17]The unit originally sold for $13 million, was relisted in 2023 at $14 million.

[00:16:25]Cash only.

[00:16:27]No bank would finance it.

[00:16:29]It sat on the market for 14 months.

[00:16:32]No offers.

[00:16:33]It eventually sold privately for $9 million.

[00:16:37]The building stands in the San Francisco skyline exactly where it was built. It's glass facade still catching the afternoon light off the bay, still visible from the bridges, still part of the silhouette the city is known for.

[00:16:50]The engineers declared the fix a success.

[00:16:53]The inspectors confirmed it was safe.

[00:16:55]The permits were legal at every stage.

[00:16:58]The monitoring says it has stopped moving.

[00:17:01]And the most expensive unit in the tower, in a building that once sold out completely, that once attracted celebrities, that once commanded [music] prices that made it the most prestigious residential address west of the Mississippi, sat unsold for over a year with no offers, listed at cash only because the financial system that once validated it had quietly made a different calculation. The structure remained.

[00:17:27]The trust did not.