Thomas Fuller, the San Francisco bureau chief for The New York Times, provides today’s introduction with news in the case of the sinking Millennium Tower.
For years, San Francisco was a famously low-rise city. Then came the tech boom and the race was on to build the glass and steel edifices that populate the world’s great cities. But in earthquake-prone San Francisco there’s a catch: many of the city’s new skyscrapers are concentrated in a neighborhood of squishy land reclaimed from the bay.
One of the new buildings, the 58-story Millennium Tower, has now sunk by 16 inches. Worse, the condominium building is sinking unevenly.
The scandal of San Francisco’s Millennium Tower turned decidedly more political on Tuesday when Aaron Peskin, a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, told reporters that he had unearthed official documents showing the city’s building inspection department had raised concerns about sinking seven years ago, just before the building was supposed to open its doors.
A letter sent by the city to the engineering firm spoke of “larger than usual” settlement of the structure and asked whether the consequences had been studied.
Yet six months later, in August 2009, the city declared the building safe for occupancy.
On Tuesday, Mr. Peskin questioned why the city allowed people to move in.
“I believe, and I know this is a very serious allegation,” Mr. Peskin said, “that there was some level of political interference.”
The response to the city’s query by the engineering firm, DeSimone Consulting Engineers, is missing from the official record, Mr. Peskin said. He has called hearings scheduled for Sept. 22, and city officials will be subpoenaed.
The hearings are likely to capture the attention of the California political class because the mayor at the time the building was approved, Gavin Newsom, is now lieutenant governor and has aspirations to become governor.
P.J. Johnston, a spokesman for Millennium Partners, told The San Francisco Chronicle that suggesting the firm received special treatment from the city was “simply outrageous.”
Some of the owners of the building, which includes the former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Joe Montana, are trying to band together to recoup losses in property values.
In August, a small army of lawyers filed a class-action lawsuit against the building’s developers as well as the Transbay Joint Powers Authority, a government entity building a transportation hub next door to the Millennium Tower. Whether or not the construction of the Transbay transport terminal contributed to the sinking has yet to be determined.
Mark Garay, one of the lawyers for the apartment owners, says it is too early to pinpoint the precise causes for the building sinking, but that it had already begun significantly before work on the transport terminal started.
“What we do know is that the foundation of this building does not go into bedrock,” he said. “It’s all landfill. It used to be part of the bay.”
Perhaps what is most clear at this point is that all of this is only the beginning of the story.