View the San Francisco for Sunday, March 16, 2025
Waves crash over a breakwater in Alameda, Calif., with the San Francisco skyline in the background on Sunday, Feb. 4, 2024. Sunday marks the fifth anniversary of COVID-19 mandatory stay-at-home orders in San Francisco, one of many jurisdictions that took similar actions to protect public health, but which also led to the rise of remote work, skyrocketing office vacancies and the savaging of downtown economies across the nation.
San Francisco’s greater downtown has taken longer than many others to recover, but recent indicators of increased office demand have many fingers crossed that this year will continue a trajectory started“From my perspective, it feels like we found the bottom, and San Francisco is back,” said Alex Schwiebert, West Coast regional market leader for Jamestown, an international real estate company that says it owns about 40% of the office space on The City’s Northern Waterfront, including the massive Levi’s Plaza campus, Waterfront Plaza, and 55 Francisco. On the retail side, Jamestown also owns the popular city landmark Ghirardelli Square. Mirroring Schwiebert’s sentiment are two reports from recent weeks indicating heightened corporate appetite for growing in The City. One from February by the U.S. audit, tax and advisory firm KPMG detailed a survey of 100 leaders in San Francisco at companies with revenues of $50 million or more. It found that 68% of respondents planned to increase headcount in 2025, and 75% planned to increase their commercial real estate footprint over the next 12-18 months. In addition, 79% of survey respondents said they are trying to bring employees back to the office more frequently, and they are increasing benefits such as happy hours and free food and expressed willingness to even consider reduced work weeks. “San Francisco is not standing still,” said Chris Cimino, managing partner of KPMG’s San Francisco office, in a press release. “Business leaders are making long-term investments—expanding their teams, growing their office presence, and reinforcing the city’s role as a hub for talent and business,” Cimino said. “Their commitment to hiring, real estate, and innovation underscores confidence in San Francisco’s future while reaffirming that the city remains a major force.”A person wearing a protective mask walks in front of the skyline on Bernal Heights Hill amid the coronavirus pandemic in San Francisco, Monday, Dec. 7, 2020. Sunday marked five years from The City’s issuance of shelter-in-place orders due to COVID-19, and hopes are high about downtown’s continued rebound. The other positive report, also released in February, came from VTS. The technology provider of real-estate information services forecast office-leasing activity this year to rise 28% in The City.At the same time, VTS in January also called San Francisco’s recovery “more nascent” compared to New York City, Chicago, and Seattle. It said the relatively modest projection for office leasing growth in New York City reflected that city’s robust recovery and nationally high office demand statistics from 2024. Much of the excitement in San Francisco centers on artificial-intelligence companies, which now lease close to 6% of The City’s office inventory, senior analyst Chris Pham of the real estate company JLL reported this month. Close to 30% of total lease deals in 2024 involved AI startups, companies that could seek more space as they grow, Pham wrote. JLL also reported that as employers have increased requirements for workers to be in office over the last year, job-posting data suggest remote jobs are on the decline in the San Francisco and Silicon Valley markets, while in-person office-job postings are on the rise. The first-quarter leasing numbers for San Francisco will emerge in coming weeks from major real-estate firms including JLL, each of which have different calculation methods. But the headlines of late have been encouraging for those who are rooting for a more robust commercial sector. “Green shoots are emerging everywhere in this city,” Mayor Daniel Lurie told an audience of urban planners at a joint California Downtown Association and International Downtown Association conference in San Francisco on Thursday., plans to move its headquarters to a larger, 150,000 square-foot lease at One Sansome Street downtown. In addition, Lurie highlighted the fact that generative-AI pioneer OpenAI opened its new headquarters in Mission Bay on Monday., said that demand for the highest-quality buildings is the bright spot in San Francisco’s office sector, with his north Financial District property setting the standard. The Transamerica Pyramid is now more than 85% leased, he said.Shvo said the complex is getting rents that are double and triple what they were five years ago, with the highest in the range of $275 per square foot, “numbers that were never seen anywhere outside New York City.”Other less-desirable buildings are largely empty, helping drive the overall vacancy rates in The City to record highs in 2024 before they dipped slightly at year’s end to 36.5%, according to CBRE, the real-estate company. Shvo’s company this week, by contrast, announced that global law firm Morgan Lewis had signed a 123,000 square-foot lease to take seven full floors in the 853-foot tall pyramid, which features tenant-only amenities such as a top-floor sky bar, a “sky lounge,” a wellness center and conference spaces. Morgan Lewis is expected to relocate from its existing office space at nearby One Market in early 2026. Last year, San Francisco was a challenging market for Atlanta-based Jamestown in some ways, with Capital One suing the company over required payments on debts on two downtown properties — roughly $25.4 million on 731 Market St. and $58.7 million on 116 New Montgomery St. Jamestown subsequently sold the smaller 731 Market St. property after coming to an agreement with its lender and retiring its loan. It also purchased its debt for the New Montgomery Street building, and at Levi’s Plaza a Jamestown affiliate purchased the debt and restructured and extended the loan. Schwiebert said the company also “reached resolution” last year with the lender on 660 Market St. The five-story building had $22.5 million in debt and interest owed when it went to new owners in a deed-in-lieu of foreclosure transaction in June, according to a public record. The company is currently investing in upgrades to its San Francisco properties, including Levi’s Plaza, which it bought in 2019. It has also been building out offices on spec for prospective tenants interested in immediate occupancy, Schwiebert said.Schwiebert is leading an effort to make the nine-building, 900,000 square-foot campus into a hive of AI and tech activity. He touted the extensive landscaped grounds, weekly food trucks, shuttles to downtown, free yoga classes, art exhibits, music performances and rooftop deck with views of Coit Tower and the bay. Three AI companies have signed leases with Jamestown in the last six months between Levi’s Plaza and Waterfront Plaza, and a fourth deal might be signed soon. The latest activity follows move-ins at Levi’s Plaza in late 2024 and earlier this year of Santa Monica-based Snap, the parent company of social-media platform Snapchat, and Supercell, the Helsinki-based creator of mobile video games “Clash of Clans” and “Clash Royale.” “A lot of these AI companies — something like 70% of them — are new entrants to the market, and a lot of them are looking to expand,” Schwiebert said. Small leases can thus turn into larger ones. Goodfire CEO and co-founder Eric Ho founded his AI research company nine months ago and expects to grow rapidly. One recent addition is Goodfire, a 13-person research lab founded nine months ago that helps its customers understand, edit and debug AI systems. The company signed a 4,100 square-foot lease at Levi’s Plaza about four months ago. “It’s just a beautiful area,” CEO and co-founder Eric Ho said. “It feels a lot more peaceful and serene away from the hubbub of downtown. We’re building a research lab, so you want researchers to feel at home and at peace when doing their cutting-edge research.” The startup has raised $7.25 million so far, and Ho said he expects to double employee headcount in the next six to nine months, double again the following year, and “continue growing exponentially beyond that,” mostly in technical positions. To launch the company, Ho came from New York City and his co-founders came from Los Angeles and London because of San Francisco’s preeminent position as the global center of AI activity. “We are building a highly technical product that requires deep expertise in mechanistic interpretability, and this is the only city to get the talent necessary to build what we’re building,” Ho said.Gurpreet Chandhoke, partner at Forge Development Partners: “It’s still the same beautiful, amazing city that I wanted to see when I was in eighth grade.” As a boy growing up with seven other family members crammed into a small room with intermittent electricity and no running water in a Mumbai slum in India, Gurpreet Chandhoke said, he used to go outside to use a street lamp to study for school and read books, which he got from a library and consumed voraciously. One paperback thriller made an indelible impression on Chandhoke, then an eighth grader — not for its intricate plot involving a kidnapping of a U.S. president, but for its electrifying description of the Golden Gate Bridge. “I was like, it would be amazing to see the Golden Gate Bridge, you know, once in my life, right?” said Chandhoke, now a 48-year-old partner at, the San Francisco company pursuing the only office-to-residential conversion that is close to breaking ground in The City, where officials have been trying to encourage such projects. Chandhoke must have been a lucky kid. An anonymous Austrian sponsor he never met paid for him to attend an all-boys Catholic grade school, where he skipped two grades, and then to attend the College of Engineering Pune Technological University in Pune, India. The nuns and priests were strict and helped him develop rigorous discipline that has served him well, Chandhoke said, but they were loving and kind. School, meanwhile, offered a refuge from his 200 square-foot home, where the chaos was exacerbated by his father’s struggles with alcohol and with providing for his family as a traveling automobile-parts salesman, Chandhoke said. Also in the apartment were his younger brother, an aunt, an uncle and two of his grandparents. Chandhoke’s father was Punjabi, and in 1947 his family fled their home in Rawalpindi, a part of northwestern India that became part of Pakistan with the partition of British India. The family, which had been prosperous, lost everything, and Chandhoke said the trauma left its mark. Chandhoke said he and his father were able to have a good relationship in later years after the elder Chandhoke stopped drinking. Before dawn, Chandhoke was up studying, and he participated readily in campus activities such as debate and acting in, writing and directing plays. “I didn’t want to be in my small house,” Chandhoke said. “School is kind of where everything happened for me in my life, because my home situation was very bad.”Gurpreet Chandhoke, Partner at Forge Development Partners, with a view of the Russ Building from his office window in San Francisco on Wednesday, Feb. 19, 2025. Chandhoke said his school taught him about computers, which became his passion after he saw a friend’s Commodore 64. He left home to go to college at 16, and for a time he was homeless, alternating between sleeping at a friend’s place and at an aunt’s home while studying electrical engineering. Upon graduation, Chandhoke said, he won a grant from the J.N. Tata Endowment that enabled him to fly to the United States, where he got a full scholarship from the University of Minnesota. There, he got a double master’s degree in electrical and mechanical engineering focused on computer-chip design. Chandhoke said that at age 22, he got his first job at a tech company in Chicago before moving to Petaluma in 1999 to work as a chip designer for a tech company just as the dot-com bubble was about to burst. Chandhoke’s hot startup employer, which had raised large sums of money, subsequently imploded, he said, and he decided he wanted to understand how to value a company. So Chandhoke went to the prestigious Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and got an M.B.A. in finance and entrepreneurship. Thus began a career in banking, first with UBS in New York City and then Deutsche Bank in San Francisco, which had an office at 101 California St. that afforded Chandhoke a view of the Golden Gate Bridge, the subject of his boyhood dreams.“I am still blown away by how beautiful and gorgeous it is,” he said. In 2009, Chandhoke launched his own investment fund focused on restructuring corporate debt, which he ran for nearly a dozen years. In 2023, Chandhoke said, he reconnected with Richard Hannum, an architect and the founding partner of Forge Development Partners, with whom Chandhoke had made a couple of investments. Chandhoke’s younger brother, a successful software engineer in India, was an enthusiastic real-estate investor, and Chandhoke wanted to get more active in that realm. Hannum invited Chandhoke to join his quest to build middle-income housing in San Francisco, and Chandhoke joined the team at the start of 2024. He was charged, among other things, with rounding up financing for projects. That has been a daunting task in recent years because of widespread reluctance among investors to commit to San Francisco, largely because of The City’s reputation — deserved or not — for poor street conditions and crime, Chandhoke said. “This affects our ability to bring capital to The City, because when I call someone in New York and say, ‘Oh, we need you to look at the debt for our building,’ they’re like, ‘Don’t bother calling me,’” he said.From left: Supervisor Matt Dorsey, then-Mayor London Breed, and CEO Richard Hannum of Forge Development Partners are seen in front of the Humboldt Bank building at 785 Market St.The company said last year it had lined up the nearly $70 million in private financing it needed and that it was entering the construction-design phase. Actual construction is expected to start in the second quarter. The building, a circa 1907 relic with an ornate dome atop a tower that rose following the destruction of the great earthquake the prior year, is a relatively ideal candidate for conversion because it is long and narrow, with plentiful windows and light, and is eligible for historic-building tax credits.“We like to call it middle-income housing, workforce housing, attainable housing, right?” he said. “The units might be a little bit smaller, but there’s no compromise in terms of the way the buildings are made.” Chandhoke said city initiatives aimed at promoting office-to-housing conversions in recent years helped make the development more attractive and will make it easier to do more projects in the future — but Forge would have been able to do the project without them. Those city actions included waiving in mid-2023 certain planning-code requirements for conversions in particular areas; voter approval last March ofexempting certain city downtown area projectsauthored by former San Francisco Assemblymember Phil Ting allowing the creation of a downtown-revitalization and economic-recovery financing district in which developers of conversion projects could qualify to get portions of their property taxes returned to them annually for 30 years. Chandhoke remarried and commutes regularly these days from Coronado — near San Diego — to San Francisco for work and to see his two daughters, who live with their mother in the East Bay. Recently, he was camped in one of the units at 361 Turk St., which is larger than his family’s childhood home.Kevin Green sits on the bed inside his unit at 361 Turk St., a micro-unit development by Forge Development Partners, on Dec. 30, 2023. The 361 Turk St. building is 95% leased, while the one at 145 Leavenworth St. is more than 80% leased. Chandhoke said drug-related activity outside the latter property is problematic, and he is bothered when he sees women with children passing by and does not understand the openness of the illegal behavior. “When I grew up in India, and it was a tough neighborhood, you would never find someone selling drugs on the street, because the police would come and arrest them,” he said. “And that part is very hard for me to come to terms with.” Chandhoke said he’s hopeful that new Mayor Daniel Lurie’s administration will succeed in burnishing The City’s reputation, rents will rise and interest rates will drop, making it easier to get financing. In a sign of a possible economic revival, Forge recently lost out with bids for two buildings it wanted to buy for office-to-residential conversions. The company has close to 1,200 units it hopes to deliver in the foreseeable future, and it might be close to a deal on two others, Chandhoke said.at the end of last year, the potential for satisfying residential demand by repurposing obsolete office space is obvious to Chandhoke. One thing Chandhoke said he’s certain about is that San Francisco will rise again, just as it did after the dot-com collapse and the Great Recession. The artificial-intelligence boom underway in The City proves again that San Francisco has an extraordinary capacity for rebirth, he said. “We feel like we are at the beginning of the launch of that slingshot right now, and things are going to turn now in real estate,” he said. Chandhoke said hat on a trip not long ago to India — a country he still loves — he took a picture of the causeway outside his childhood home, where there were still three pit toilets shared by multiple apartments and two water-storage vessels. Chandhoke recalled how his family could only fill the drums from a pipe once a day during a single allotted time period. He saw children out begging instead of being in school, some of whom he and his brother help with donations. “The difference between America and India is that if you’re born poor in India, it’s a curse,” said Chandhoke, who said he’s grateful he landed in a place where hard work can change futures, people are willing to judge on merits and individuals are encouraged to think for themselves. “This is the greatest country in the world, and this is the greatest city in America,” he said. “It’s still the same beautiful, amazing city that I wanted to see when I was in eighth grade.”A long-planned “quick-build” bike lane on Oak Street suffered a slowdown, but now it is back on the table. Pending final approval, the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Authority is poised to move forward with the construction of a protected bike lane along Oak Street after unexpectedly delaying construction and sparking fear that despite having money in hand, city transportation officials would stall or abandon the project. Local merchants, meanwhile, have grown increasingly concerned with the prospect of having more residents and visitors of the popular neighborhood fighting for a dwindling number of parking spots. After a public hearing in November, it looked like the Oak Street project would cruise to the SFMTA Board of Directors for final approval in December. But in the months since, the agency had quietly punted on the project, prompting advocatesThe SFMTA now expects the board of directors to take up the proposal as-is at its April 1 meeting, citing the recent wave of change at City Hall as the reason for the delay.as a way to swiftly improve safety on The City’s most dangerous streets, resigned in December days before new Mayor Daniel Lurie took the helm. The supervisorial district in which the project is planned, District 5, also saw voters replace incumbent Supervisor Dean Preston with new Supervisor Bilal Mahmood.District 5 Supervisor Bilal Mahmood, pictured meeting with Haight Ashbury Merchants at Woods Lowside at 530 Haight St., in San Francisco on Tuesday, Dec. 17, 2024, says the Oak Street bike lane has been “ready to go” for months. “There was a need for continued outreach and communication with stakeholders including new leadership at the SFMTA and District 5,” Michael Roccaforte, an SFMTA spokesperson, told The Examiner in an email. “So we’re on course with the same design and funding is secure.”“It’s already effectively ready to go since December,” Mahmood said. Preston’s office had backed the plan from the beginning. Preston Kilgore, a District 5 resident and former aide to ex-Supervisor Preston, called it key to “creating an east-west safe streets network to ensure that people can safely get downtown or experience some of our best city amenities, such as Car Free JFK, Cal Academy or Ocean Beach.” “Even though I was disappointed that the Oak Street Bike Lane wasn’t approved before Supervisor Preston left office, I am excited at the prospect of finally seeing this long-awaited project move forward,” Kilgore told The Examiner in an email. The protected bike lane planned for Oak Street would follow implementation of a similar project on Fell Street, its unidirectional siblingwhich was narrowed from four lanes to three to allow for the installation of a protected bike lane between the Panhandle and a row of car parking in 2020. The updated design has been credited by officials for spurring an increase in bicycle traffic and a decrease in traffic collisions along Fell Street. On eastbound Oak Street, the plans similarly call for the removal of one car lane and installation of a protected bike lane from Stanyan to Baker streets. A new, protected southbound bike lane on Baker Street will also connect Fell and Oak. The project makes a number of other tweaks in the area, including installation of upgraded pedestrian crossings to improve visibility for motorists. Bicycling and safe-streets advocates have long backed the plan, which along with the Fell Street bike lane they view as a key east-west route and component of The City’sThe protected bike lane planned for Oak Street would follow implementation of a similar project on its unidirectional sibling across the panhandle, Fell Street.According to a November SFMTA presentation, the quick-build project would remove between 21 and 23 parking spots from Oak and Baker streets, and 26 more spaces are now illegal thanks to the daylighting law. The SFMTA delayed enforcement of the law, which went into effect Jan. 1, but citations are coming. The agency announced in February that it would only issue citations to cars parked whereThe prospect of daylighting added to existing fears about diminishing parking availability and access for cars to the neighborhood, which is about to see the arrival of hundreds of new residents at an affordable-housing project at 730 Stanyan St. The building will not include resident parking, though it’s unclear how many of its residents will be car owners. “What we’re seeing is a confluence of circumstances that are going to create further conflict for limited parking spots,” said Christin Evans, a board member of the Haight Ashbury Merchants Association.further limiting peoples’ ability to rely on public transportation. Evans, who also owns the bar Alembic, noted that buses already aren’t an option for employees getting off work after midnight. The merchants association is working with city leaders to explore options to bring additional parking to the area, such as expanding access or capacity at a Recreation and Park Department-managed lot across Stanyan Street from the new affordable-housing development. The Urban School, one of the Oak Street project’s neighbors, supports the improvements to pedestrian and bicycle safety at the nearby intersection of Masonic Avenue and Oak Street, according to Dan Miller, its head of school. But Miller said the school joined other nearby institutions in voicing unease about the change to parking the project will make, weighing that loss while noting that cyclists have access to Page Street — part of SFMTA’s Slow Streets Program — and a multiuse path through the Panhandle. “The SFMTA has taken time to evaluate Urban’s concerns, and we understand from them that modifications to the plan are not feasible,” Miller said.Click and hold your mouse button on the page to select the area you wish to save or print. You can click and drag the clipping box to move it or click and drag in the bottom right corner to resize it. When you're happy with your selection, click the checkmark icon next to the clipping area to continue.This is the name that will be displayed next to your photo for comments, blog posts, and more. Choose wisely!Create a password that only you will remember. 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