^^^I don't want to call him out too hard on this, but I refer back to things in various construction/community threads from time to time and I have noticed a very clear trend with Wakamesalad's posts. A lot of them are like his
REPEATED HYSTRIONICS / ALARMS / CRAZY OPINIONS FROM SOMEONE WHO HASN'T LIVED IN THE CITY IN A WHILE AND DOESN'T LIVE IN THE CITY NOW
Bisnow just had a morning event, which I did not attend, but the email blast had the recap and basically the whole thing was about the SF Tower. Bisnow wouldn't charge professionals in the SF real estate/finance community $65-90+ to come listen to a bunch of their peers at BXP/Hines/Allen Matkins/C&W/CBRE talk about a single tower for an hour one morning if it weren't presently under construction. This was roughly 2 weeks ago, after the TBT announcement.
Let's not forget a few simple facts about construction of tall towers in SF:
1) These towers sit on highly active geologic faults that produce strong earthquakes (we literally just had a 6.1 right outside the city that shook every building, and I was just in Bloomingdales a couple Saturdays ago and the whole department store was vibrating and shaking the whole time I was in there...for perception/fear alone anyone building a tower needs to be able to "basically guarantee" its absolute safety from collapse/catastrophic damage, which includes shattered glass on the sidewalks)
1a) About that shattered glass - I was just getting lunch the other day and leaned against a glass pane, and it bent under my fairly light weight. The group consensus was that it had to do with earthquake safety. The glass is engineered to withstand pressures from buckling/shattering, preventing thousands of pounds, perhaps many many tons of glass shards falling hundreds of feet onto people below.
1b) About the foundation - SF foundations can piss on NYC/Chicago/Boston/Denver/Houston foundations. These things are the craziest engineering feats (of foundations) in the world. Ranging from buildings on rollers to caissons drilled to 300+ft deep to find strong enough bedrock (in SF Tower's case)
2) Nothing in CA gets built without insane green building practices. And I'm talking things that aren't even required/tracked by LEED. Title 24 in CA only makes this more of a concern for developers, and many of these things take a while to work out.
3) Why do they take longer to work out in CA, particularly SF? Because everything is more expensive here, but it's all still required. And SF in particular is a city where all the bells and whistles of every standard (green, engineering, top tier tenant demands, neighborhood demands, regulations, etc) come together. Hines/BXP already paid $160M for the land alone. Then they had to pencil out perhaps close to another $100M alone on the foundation/prep work, which they haven't even finished. This is all before vertical construction and green considerations. Like Manhattan, these towers aren't built and then flipped (as one might do in Chicago, Atlanta, Seattle, LA, Philly, Dallas, etc). These are long term development/hold strategies.
4) Every city has crazy NIMBYs. Even in my hometown, I would say the NIMBYs in one particular neighborhoods are almost as intense as the average NIMBY in SF. But nobody has NIMBYs like SF does. I can't even begin to explain them to people who haven't lived here and dealt with them in any meaningful way for at least a year. My first year here, working in real estate, I was literally baffled by them (as evidenced by some of my initial naive posts when I first moved here).
This is a HUGE contingency every developer has to deal with to a much higher degree than anywhere else in the US, save for a few other smaller CA towns (Santa Monica, Berkeley, Malibu). Nobody can possibly argue that their NIMBYs compare.
What it means is a risk that your individual project gets taken to ballot to be voted on by the entire populace (which SF Tower literally was)...after you just dropped tens of millions on the land and worked out a JV and have financing coming just across the table. So you have to spend $$$$$$$$$$$$$$, time, and quite literally blood, sweat, and TEARS to make sure your development happens in a way that pencils out to your original thesis/overall financial structure (the last part, when NIMBYs literally hire an architect to redesign a project and they say it "works", they can't comprehend the financial aspect of it, and neither can the Supes or the Planning Dept, so it's especially hard).
5) Finally, SF regulation, cronyism, and the ultimate Democratic process. Words cannot explain this.
As alluded to above, you may own private property and conform to zoning, but a granola cruncher 5 miles away with some cash and spare time can derail your entire project by putting it on a ballot via signatures collected (not that many...just stand in front of any given Whole Foods or housing project), partner with a competing office or multifamily landlord for a whee bit of cash for advertising, lie and slander you on TV, and then destroy your whole development for almost no absolute reason.
I guess what I'm getting at, is that if you have made it as far as BXP/Hines (aka more than 50% pre-leased, $160M into the land, approved by SF in every way, $100M into construction), you are GOING to cross the finish line. The only players in town are the most patient, the most knowledgeable, and those either teamed up with a solid local developer for navigation purposes or those national/global firms who have been here done that long enough with a boots on the ground team that can get something done. The cost (in both time and money) to do real estate business in SF prevents most shops from entering the market.
In my time in SF, versus other markets, I have not heard one story of one group backstabbing or stealing a deal from another group. What's common practice in markets where deal volume and competition to hit deals within a certain time frame (i,e, more opportunistic markets) does not occur in SF. Each piece of land and each deal here is meant for THE right developer, and each developer is meant for very a specific piece(s) of land. Deals aren't replicated. The Transbay District is a perfect example of this.
Histrionics doesn't deserve to be a part of the SF Tower story, whether in public media or on a skyscraper enthusiast forum.
Rant over...