High-Rise Construction Project Boom Is Redrawing San Francisco's Skyline

SAN FRANCISCO (KPIX 5) -- It has been one year now since so much attention was paid to the Salesforce Tower, how it stands above the old skyline and how it stands symbolically above a changing city. That new skyline is still coming together and so is Salesforce Tower itself, in some respects.

"We're done," said Steve Colvin, Senior Vice President of Property Management at Boston Properties, the company that owns the tower. "We're still moving people into the building."

Walking through the lobby, Salesforce Tower feels packed, but some floors of the building are still a work in progress. The freight elevators required to build out floors of the building can only allow for so much construction at one time, but the building will be full within the next six months.

"From an occupancy standpoint, right now we're at 80 percent," Colvin explained. "Quickly headed towards 100 percent."

Just as Salesforce has been filling up over the last year, so has the rest of South of Market with a wave of high and mid-rise buildings--in various stages of construction, they're sprouting from just off the Embarcadero all the way out to Van Ness.

Not only is the boom filling in the new skyline, it is redrawing the skyline's sense of style.

"It is, but it's beautiful," said Sheila, who lives just across from one of the construction sites. "Very seldom do you see architecture like this. So I'm happy to have it, literally right outside my window."

Sheila lives next to "Mira," a residential tower spiraling out of the ground on the 100 block of Folsom. It might be the most eye-catching of the new towers, but there are more on the way, including the building that will become the second tallest in San Francisco.

"I think it's a more versatile look than the uniformity that's currently here. But it's like a new uniformity, to the current uniformity," said Jennifer Sawyer after seeing renderings of Oceanwide Center Tower 1.

She was looking through the construction fencing to watch the foundation work. The renderings struck her as familiar, perhaps because the design comes in part from the same architectural firm as the nearby 181 Fremont. Most of the Oceanwide Center's tower design, with its striking exoskeleton, came from London-based Foster + Partners.

As for Oceanwide, the soon-to-be second tallest building in the city, it will sit just to the northwest of Salesforce. It will be completed in 2022.