San Francisco's Millennium Tower Tilting 3 Inches Per Year

SAN FRANCISCO — San Francisco’s infamous Millennium Tower keeps on tilting at breakneck speed after work to save the skyscraper was abandoned last summer. Here are the details:

The Guardian reports that San Francisco’s infamous Millennium Tower keeps on tilting over more and more — at about 3 inches, or 7.5 centimeters, per year.

A $100 million dollar construction project to stop the tilting on the leaning tower of San Francisco was abandoned in the summer of 2021, when it became clear that the construction did nothing to stop the building from tilting over at a speed of 3 inches per year.

San Francisco’s leaning tower opened to great fanfare in 2009, and its 400 apartments quickly sold out for a total of $750 million.

Soon after, some of the apartments reached prices of more than $5 million each, but all that came crashing down when it became apparent that the building was sinking into the soft soil, and also tilting at an unsettling speed.

Today, the building’s total tilt at rooftop level has already reached 26 inches, or 66 centimeters.

The engineer tasked with saving the building says if the structure keeps on tipping over, the elevators and plumbing will eventually stop functioning.

He added that the best way to stop the tilting is to attach 18 steel piles to bedrock under the building.

Apartment owners say the building’s uncertain future means their multimillion dollar investments have turned into dust.

They say the real value of their super luxurious apartments is now zero dollars, as no one wants to buy them for any price.

SOURCES: The Guardian, NBC News, NBC Bay Area, Architectural Digest

[partha]

The new tilting tower update looks fun. Last one we had was at Pisa.

[KabukeeJo]

The pilings should have hit bedrock before using them to jack up the building. But they just repeated the stupidity of the original construction and wasted more money.

[BJIa]

So even over here we have soft ground in the city I don’t know which will fall first this tower or the one in Pisa this has to be a wake up call when starting to build a new tower or office building.

[michaelsmith]

LOL - and to think that there are realtors in San Francisco promoting this disaster waiting to happen as a "unique opportunity to own something spectacular." Only a fool would buy there. Oh well.

[petermontoya]

I live in the city, not in the Millennium Towers. In a different high rise. The Millennium Tower is leaning SO MUCH that the lower floor sewers are not emptying as the should. The tilt has effected the way waste water leaves the building. So now, it's backing up into the lower floors. Yummy for those tenants. The owners claim that people aren't flushing toilets correctly. It seems odd that non of the other buildings that were built in that area at the same time have issues of tilt. It's gonna cost around $1 Billion to fix this. Would have been only $100 million to do the job right.