But across the country, San Francisco offers an intriguing counterpoint: distinctive architecture is conspicuously lacking in the high-rise building boom.

Forty years after it was completed, the 850-foot Transamerica Pyramid remains the most recognizable high-rise tower built in the City by the Bay. Designed by the architect William Pereira, it took a lot of flak from locals during its planning and construction, with detractors sometimes referring to it as a phallic symbol, though their actual wording was more blunt.

Nevetheless, it became a fixture of the city’s skyline. Today it stands mostly alone in a city more interested in conserving its old Victorian-style homes than in making a statement with new development. It is a puzzling phenomenon in a part of the country often seen as an engine of American innovation.

“People work hard to preserve old things without taking the risk to build something new,” Mr. Gehry said about San Francisco in a recent phone conversation.

He was critical of the high-rise building boom under way in San Francisco’s South of Market area, where the newly built towers are boxy and utilitarian. “It’s business without heart,” he said.

In the past decade, 13 high-rise condo towers of 20 stories or more have been built in San Francisco. Another four such projects have been approved by the city, according to the Mark Company, a real estate marketing and sales firm.

There is nary a brand-name architecture firm to be found among the towers that have already been built, though Handel Architects did design the sleek Millennium Tower. A new luxury high-rise being designed by Richard Meier is still struggling to get approved by the city after almost five years of development.

The new buildings South of Market are meant to attract singles and young couples, many of whom are working in the tech industry and don’t yet want the hassles of a single-family home. And while higher-end offerings like the Millennium have attracted a few prominent locals — like the former 49ers quarterback Joe Montana — foreigners, especially from China, make up a large chunk of the buyers.

At the Madrone, another high-rise in the newly developed neighborhood of Mission Bay, a young techie apartment owner I spoke with said that the architecture of the building had never really been a consideration.

That doesn’t surprise Mr. Stern, who doesn’t see young tech buyers as having the sophistication to care about buildings (though, it must be said, they may have refined tastes in the subtle design touches of the latest smartphones). “I think it takes them awhile to get over the initial high-dose blast of wealth to realize that wealth can be used more creatively than just buying big shoebox spaces and sticking in foosball games and other things like that,” Mr. Stern said.

The young software engineers may not care too much about the quality of architecture where they live, but down in Silicon Valley some big tech firms have tapped world-renowned architects to design their new headquarters.

Facebook hired Mr. Gehry, 83, for the expansion of its campus in Menlo Park. Mr. Gehry designed a 433,555-square-foot building with a rooftop garden that will be built on stilts. “It should look like a floating forest where the building peeks from beneath a series of trees,” said Slater Tow, a Facebook spokesman. “We are not out to make an architectural statement, we are out to make the most functional building for engineers.”

It was Steve Jobs himself who commissioned Sir Norman Foster to design Apple’s new 2.8-million-square-foot headquarters in Cupertino, which Mr. Jobs described as a “spaceship.”

Both the Apple and Facebook projects are expected to be completed by the end of 2015.

But just a commute away in San Francisco, there is little buzz about big-name designers. “San Francisco is not a place where people shout architects’ names on a building,” said Mary Comerio, a professor in the Graduate School of Architecture at the University of California, Berkeley. “You get more controversy when that happens.”

Indeed, developers in San Francisco are loath to take architectural risks because the city’s approval process for new development is long and rigorous, perhaps the most onerous in the country, architects say.

It’s hard to fault their caution when you consider how small San Francisco really is — 47 square miles (Manhattan alone is 23 square miles) — with much of the area consumed by neighborhoods zoned for single-family homes. More than the pedigree of the architect, the city worries about things like shadows and wind and, of course, earthquakes.

The earthquake issue is not as tough to navigate as you might think, but it is still a costly concern. The Bay Area remains highly susceptible to earthquakes, and “seismic readiness” can add as much as 15 percent to the cost of a new structure, said Mark Sarkisian, director of seismic and structural engineering in the San Francisco office of Skidmore, Owings Merrill, which built the John Hancock Center and Sears (now Willis) Tower in Chicago.

Not surprisingly, the science of engineering tall buildings has come a long way in the last 20 years. The structures have special joints to dissipate energy without fracturing during a quake. They can bend, almost like a fishing pole.

In the South of Market area, the sandy soil creates a bigger risk if a big one hits. So developers need to dig foundations 100 to 125 feet deep, Mr. Sarkisian said.

All the engineering advances have made newer high-rises less susceptible to collapse than lower-rise brick structures being held together by gravity, experts say.

But it hasn’t been fear of earthquakes that has held up the approval of a residential tower being designed by Mr. Meier’s firm for the corner of Market Street and Van Ness Avenue. City planners were concerned about how an early design for the building, currently scheduled to have 37 floors, would affect wind conditions for pedestrians, said Bernhard Karpf, an associate partner at Richard Meier Partners, who is in charge of the project.

“They describe that area as having ‘hazardous wind conditions,’ where people would literally get blown off the street,” Mr. Karpf said.

The developer David Choo asked Mr. Meier in 2009 to do something that was “not your traditional San Francisco architecture,” Mr. Karpf said. Meier Partners initially designed a “free-standing sculptural object” on the small site. With approval threatened, the firm hired a Canadian company to test a scale model in a wind tunnel, delaying the design process by another year.

“We had never heard of these kinds of wind regulations,” Mr. Karpf said. “It became almost obsessive on the planning board’s side to make sure wind is mitigated.”

Their frustration mounting, the Meier architects asked the Canadian company to give them three or four shapes that would meet the wind requirements. “We have to move forward,” Mr. Karpf said he told them. “We have to find a solution that works. It may look horrible, but let’s see if we can reverse the process and turn it into a building.”

In the end, the slender shape of the building “was strongly influenced” by studies in the wind tunnel laboratory, which showed that it would “actually improve wind conditions in this part of town,” he said.

When Mr. Karpf asked Mr. Choo how he could stand to buy a property and still have nothing to show for it some five years later, he shrugged and told the architect, “That’s the way it works in San Francisco.”

Follow Alexei Barrionuevo on Twitter: @alexeinyt.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/18/realestate/big-deal-in-san-francisco-life-without-starchitects.html?pagewanted=all

The young tech crowd rented — and sometimes bought — in commercial buildings in this former warehouse area, converting them into “work-live” spaces where they operated their nascent companies and slept (once in awhile).

The boom-and-bust cycles in the tech sector move quickly, and the pace of constant reinvention and innovation is relentless.

The same is true of tastes in real estate. Today a new generation of tech dreamers is back in the South of Market area. But this time they are breathing life into a start-up wave not previously seen in San Francisco: high-rise condo living.

A clutch of new condo buildings and condo-hotels, some with stunning views of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge and Twin Peaks, have sprung up downtown in the past five years. For what would be considered modest prices in Manhattan, they are offering a full-service lifestyle that locals have traditionally steered away from, preferring the single-family homes traditionally available in the City by the Bay.

In the late 1990s, if someone wanted to live in a high-end condo, the options were almost nonexistent. “There wasn’t any signature building that people said, ‘I gotta have it,’ ” said Max Armour, a real estate agent with TRI Coldwell Banker.

Today there are at least two, both a few blocks south of Market Street. In terms of quality, amenities and V.I.P. neighbors, the 60-story Millennium Tower is San Francisco’s version of 15 Central Park West, or perhaps the yet-to-be-completed One57.

At Millennium, tech millionaires from Google, Twitter, Zynga and Salesforce mingle with celebrity residents like the 49ers legend Joe Montana and the chef Michael Mina, who runs RN74, the restaurant in the building. Thomas Perkins, the venture capitalist, lives in a 4,500-square-foot penthouse he bought in 2009 for $9.35 million.

Just up Mission Street from the Millennium, and nearer the financial district, is the St. Regis, a more low-key building, though also lauded for its refinement. Last December a 17,100-square-foot penthouse there sold to a Hong Kong family for $28 million, said Gregg Lynn, the broker at Sotheby’s International Realty who represented the sellers.

Other buildings south of Market have been selling swiftly, including Madrone, or have sold out, like Infinity. Developers have taken advantage of zoning regulations in the newer neighborhoods of South Beach, Mission Bay and Rincon Hill to erect taller towers than would be allowed in better-established residential pockets of the city. Millennium Tower, at 645 feet, is San Francisco’s tallest residential building.

“There is a whole new generation of wealth that has found its way into San Francisco,” said Richard G. Baumert, a partner with the New York-based Millennium Partners, which developed Millennium Tower. “Whether through stock options or whatever, there has been this influx of buying from the tech sector that has had a positive impact on the whole market.”

Some of the wealthiest tech buyers have ranged beyond South of Market and bought trophy properties throughout the city.

In February Jack Dorsey, a founder of Twitter and Square, bought a two-bedroom house perched on a cliff overlooking the Pacific for $9.99 million. A few months later Mark Pincus, a founder of Zynga, paid $16 million for a seven-bedroom 11,500-square-foot house in the Pacific Heights neighborhood. Jonathan Ive, the Apple executive responsible for the design of the iPhone and iPad, bought an English-style manor on “Billionaire’s Row” in Pacific Heights for $17 million.

The recent fall in stock prices for companies like Facebook and Zynga hasn’t done a whole lot to slow the buying, brokers say. “If that hadn’t happened our inventory probably would be at zero now,” Mr. Lynn said.

The inventory in the San Francisco area, which includes the East Bay, dropped by 42.2 percent over the past year, the biggest drop after Sacramento among the country’s 30 largest metro areas, according to Zillow, the real estate Web site.

As for the young tech professionals, the catalyst for their condo purchases — often in developments South of Market — is San Francisco’s exceedingly tight rental market. What the buildings lack in proximity to supermarkets and night life they make up for with an easier commute to tech companies in Silicon Valley, which can take up to 90 minutes during rush hour. A train station for lines running south to the valley is in Mission Bay, as are on-ramps for the expressway.

“It’s like living in TriBeCa and working in New Jersey,” said Alan Mark, president of the Mark Company, a real estate marketing and sales firm.

Follow Alexei Barrionuevo on Twitter: @alexeinyt.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/21/realestate/in-san-francisco-glass-and-steel-condos-rising-by-the-bay.html?pagewanted=all

Surprising news out of the census: San Francisco had 30,000 empty homes in 2010, reports Blanca Torres of the San Francisco Business Times. That’s an 8.3 vacancy rate, higher than the state average, and higher than any other county in the Bay Area. 

Torres asks the question that’s no doubt on everyone’s mind: “As many people who have moved to the City by the Bay can attest, finding housing here can be challenging whether you are renting or buying — and it’s not just the cost factor. I have to wonder why there are not fewer vacant units considering the high demand and seemingly tight supply. Who are these property owners holding the keys to empty homes?”

Marin County had the next highest vacancy rate at 7.2 percent, followed by Alameda County and Contra Costa County. Silicon Valley had the lowest vacancy. 

So what’s causing this high rate of vacancy in what is considered one of the most desirable cities to live in? According to Torres’ follow-up piece, possible explanations offered by Biz Times readers include: people waiting for a better real estate market to sell, people owning homes in San Francisco for investment or vacation purposes, and finally, landlords who are fearful of renting to bad tenants, given the tough protections for renters in the city.

Article source: http://www.baycitizen.org/blogs/pulse-of-the-bay/sf-leads-bay-area-vacant-homes/