Pier 70 Site

Having secured voter approval for increased building heights across the 28-acre-core of the Pier 70 site back in 2014, the Environmental Planning for Forest City’s massive project was soon underway. And yesterday, the 2000-page Draft Environmental Impact Report for the project was released.

Depending upon whether the development team decides to maximize the Central Waterfront site for residential or commercial use, the Pier 70 Project will include between 1,645 and 3,025 residential units; between 1.1 and 2.3 million square feet of commercial/office space; and up to 487,000 square feet of space for retail, light industrial and arts uses along with 3,400 off-street parking spaces and nine acres of open space.

New buildings will range from 50 to 90 feet in height, intermingled with a few rehabilitated structures across the site.

And assuming the project’s Impact Report is certified by the City and the redevelopment is approved as proposed, construction is currently slated to commence in 2018 and be phased though 2029.

The redevelopment of Pier 70’s Historic Core, a separate six acre project, is already underway.

37 thoughts on “Massive Pier 70 Project Reaches a Major Milestone”
  1. Given this is set to be developed from 2018 to 2029 and, going with the higher office component, (2.3 million square feet) have the developers secured a guaranteed slice of Prop M’s allocation for those years?

  2. I hope they can implement a more timeless style. This is just going to scream 2010 to anyone who visits the site in 2029.

  3. Hopefully there will be no organized opposition to this project. Yes, that hope is a stretch for SF but this project ought to be broadly accepted since there’s very little residential abutting the project site. Nice to see Irish Hill as the centerpiece for a park.

    Wow, the EIR is huge!

      1. I think you’ve got it. At least the T is a block away and has plenty of capacity to soak up some demand. There’s also a shuttle plan to Caltrain and BART to mitigate the impact.

        I still cannot comprehend the traffic estimates. 40,000 trips just to the restaurants? If you work that out to 2 trips per visit per seat and then on average 6 seatings per day that comes out to ~3000 restaurant seats. That’s some big dining. Something in my assumptions or math must be wrong.

        In any case the fact that California has abandoned automobile level-of-service as an EIR metric should help fend off NIMBY complaints about traffic congestion.

    1. LOL, don’t hold your breath waiting for that sea level rise. According to the global warming alarmist predictions from years ago the polar ice should all be gone by now and coasts should already be flooded.

      1. actually, no, the predictions used to be it would take hundreds of years to see much happen, but with each passing year of record CO2 concentrations and record heats (and ever shrinking arctic ice cover), only recently have the consensus predictions been that we may be able to see real change in our lifetimes.

      2. Onslow, where do you get your misinformation? Talk radio? Try going to college. You’ll find much more accurate information there and won’t risk sounding so naive in the future.

    2. The EIR mentions a berm as an alternative to manage sea level rise, but instead proposes: “Finished floors of buildings within the project site would be elevated…to accommodate 66 inches of sea level rise and the 100-year storm surge….The Proposed Project would include a public financing mechanism to pay for the cost of future improvements related to sea level rise adaptation, should such improvements be necessary, with the City and the Port responsible for implementing these strategies.” 66 inches was a max sea level rise by 2100 as forecast in 2012. The references are in the EIR.

      BTW, the temperature near the North Pole reached 32 degrees F today. They are having a heat wave at the start of winter in the not-so-frozen-north: “Data from the National Snow and Ice Data Center indicate the Arctic lost about 57,000 square miles of ice in the past day, which is roughly the size of Michigan.”

      [Editor’s Note: Climate Change Hits Home as the Bay Is Expected to Rise.]

    3. Sea level rise is not uniform across the globe. Some places will see a lot, some places it is actually going Down. Yep. Down. Real science. Sea level rose a total of 7 inches at the Golden Gate tidal station from 1900 to 2000. There has been Zero recorded sea level rise at the Golden Gate station for the past 15 years. It’s not like filling a bathtub. Climate change is real, polar ice melting is real, but sea level rise is a lot more complicated than is commonly understood. Pier 70 should still raise the grades a couple of feet so they don’t end up with a big mess like Mission Bay….

        1. Same data source. But it’s not a linear regression. It’s time series statistics.

          It’s leveled out. Underlying gravitational variables are not stationary either. Google grace gcm3. Area off the SF coast is 30 milligals below average. That decrease is increasing as the San Francisco antipode off of Madagascar is seeing an increase +50 milligals due to redistribution of mass from ice melting.

          1. yeah, I know it is a time series. I also know that this data shows it has been increasing this century. Not sure what you mean by “leveling out”, though perhaps you mean something like increasing but less rapidly, which is not Zero. And yeah, I also know that effects of sea level rise due to global warming vary by region/locale. Quelle surprise.
            Regardless of all of that, the accepted/official prediction for the SF Bay along the SF central waterfront is for increasing for many decades ahead. That affects how their proposal will be judged.

    1. That’s internal+external trips. Still seems high. 40K trips daily just for restaurant traffic alone. This site’s gonna employ a lot of waiters.

  4. FINALLY. 3,000 units will be a drop in the bucket, but should stave off these insane rent increases if only for a moment.

    [Editor’s Note: Rents in San Francisco are already on the decline.]

    1. This will be a net negative for housing affordability since it adds at least 7300 jobs (1.1m sqft office space / 150 sqft per typical job), more than twice the number of homes. In the worst case, 2.3m sqft office and only 1645 homes, the ratio is more than 9:1 jobs to homes.

      1. Most of these workers will be commuting from less expensive areas, like you have today. What will worsen is traffic because the Bay Area’s transit infrastructure will not be able to keep up with the population increase.

  5. Did they seriously use a half-complete salesforce tower as the backdrop of one of their renderings?…as if this isn’t a rendering of what it will look like in 10 years?

  6. To encourage transit ridership Muni should run 2-car trains on the T line, since it will be running in the Central Subway by the time development is completed.

      1. In an ideal world, perhaps, but not in SF. To reduce subway construction costs, underground stations will only be the length of 2 cars, unlike the Market St. subway and even the older Forest Hill station, the latter which can accommodate 3-car trains. That’s what you get for $2B, folks.

        1. So true but so unfortunate as, IMO, much of this money is wasted. Say what you will about Trump, but Boeing has reduced significantly the cost of the two Air Force Ones that are on order after his cancelation comment. The taxpayer is being ripped off and it is seen, IMO, in some of these SF transit projects..

          1. @Dick: there is no source since there are no real figures as they haven’t even settled yet on just what capabilities the planes will have. Nobody knows where he got the bogus $4 Billion figure.

            Meanwhile, after spending 450 $Billion on development of the F-35, he’s threatening Lockheed with cancellation of procurement in favor of building more F-18’s which have no stealth feature supposedly to save a few million per copy. He’s just dicking with them with no understanding of what he’s doing.

            I’m confident he’s destined to join Milhouse as the next president to resign in-term.

          2. Actually the 4 billion figure comes from budget analysts. From the Washington Post:

            “Analysts said that while the Air Force had budgeted $2.7 billion for the Air Force One program, the costs would likely grow to about $4 billion after the planes were actually manufactured. The planes are expected to be operational by the mid-2020s.”

            There is waste in government spending with lobbyists and others getting a piece of the pie. No better example of that is the TTC or the east span of the BB.. Or, on a day to day level, the City having a team of 4 replace a few damaged trees on Portola.

  7. It would be great if Trump cancelled the f-35 and spent money on Transit – no matter how much over budget the T-line is. We just spent the last 8 years blowing hundreds of billions bombing 7 countries. Time to stop doing that and start spending our money here on making our cities better.

    1. I’m all in with you for gutting the Pentagon in favor of infrastructure at home, but don’t count on it: he ran a campaign including a pledge to “rebuild our military” and has already signaled that rebuilding the country will be deferred at the least.

      I don’t know why you would focus upon our foreign misadventures of the last 8 years when all relates back to W’s disastrous 2003 invasion of Iraq, likely the greatest blunder in the history of the American presidency.

      1. We will see what we will see. I take it as a good sign that military lobbyists are unhappy with Trump as are neo-cons (over his NATO comments) – at least Trump spoke the truth about the F-35. Even Obama was beholding to the military lobbyists. The waste in the military – I won’t go there.

        Trump took over a stalled public project in NYC and brought it in ahead of time and under budget. Something the government powers that be – whether in the Bay Area or nationally – can’t do. The SF DPW is a bloated joke.

        The conservatives are aghast at his infrastructure proposal – more government spending. But some hints coming out are it will partner w/private industry and not cost the taxpayer as much as conservatives think.

        If Trump had been in charge of HSR instead of Jerry and the California legislature it would be near done – IMO. Of course with a SJ stop and Oakland terminus. Better be quiet – I might give the new Administration ideas.

      2. Im not sure how bombing 6 more countries all relates back to the 2003 invasion of Iraq unless your making the can of pringles argument. I.e. I opened it and ate one – so I better finish off the rest of the can now so they won’t go stale?. Been a lot of promises made and broken over the last 8 years about making the cities better here. All those broken BART cars are older than the millinieals riding them. Obama is in power until Jan 20th. Guess I’m hoping he will get it together like the Cubs did in the 7th game 10th inning. You never know. 🙂

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