The Leaning Millennium Tower $100 million Fix to Correct the Sinking

Four years after the Millennium Tower grabbed international attention as the world’s most prominent sinking and leaning high-rise, the off-kilter condo tower is set to start a $100 million fix that residents hope will not only correct the engineering blunders of the past but restore values in the beleaguered building. Over the next few weeks, the scaffolding will be erected at 301 Mission St. The sidewalks will be barricaded off. Pile drivers will start drilling the first of 52 concrete, 140,000-pound piles that will anchor the building to bedrock 250 feet below ground. The two-year project will relieve stress on soils that have compressed beneath the building, contributing to its unwelcome and unanticipated sinking. Disruption to current residents is expected to be minor. “This plan halts settlement along Fremont and Mission Streets while allowing the building to level itself over time,” said engineer Ronald Hamburger of Simpson Gumpertz & Heger, who led the team that designed the plan. Perhaps the city’s poshest luxury condo tower when it opened in April 2009, the Millennium became notorious in 2016 when engineers monitoring its settlement discovered it had sunk 18 inches and was leaning 14 inches to the west. The flawed foundation sparked lawsuits from residents against the developer, Millennium Partners, as well as the architect and engineers who designed the concrete and glass building. Values plummeted. Banks stopped lending to the few buyers willing to take a chance in the building. The start of work on the foundation fix was made possible by a legal settlement hammered out over two years, according to the Millennium Tower Association, the homeowners association for the building. The mediation was led by retired Judge Daniel Weinstein, Judge Ronald Sabraw and mediator Gerald Kurland, who assisted the parties in resolving all claims. Millennium Partners spokesman P.J. Johnston said the developer, which has built two other downtown condo towers, was determined to reach a deal that was acceptable to all parties. “A lot of companies might have tried to tie this up in court for decades and skip town, but Millennium Partners remained committed to this building, committed to the people who live there and committed to San Francisco, which is why we fought so hard to hold the mediation together and get a retrofit done.” Details of the legal settlement have not been made public. A statement from the homeowners association said that the “project will be funded by the multiple parties who settled the homeowner claims and their insurance companies.” The developer has blamed the sinking on eroded soil from the construction of the adjacent Transbay transit center. The Transbay Joint Powers Authority, a public agency that built the transit center, was part of the settlement. As part of the settlement, owners in the building were paid between 25% and 40% of the value of their units before the revelations of the building’s design flaws, according to residents. While the payments varied based on unit type and when it was purchased, the owner of a two-unit building that would have sold for $2.5 million in 2016 would probably have received a lump sum of at least $625,000, and possibly more.