San Francisco’s lavish Millennium Tower, with soaring panoramic views and world-class amenities, opened to great fanfare in 2009.
A dozen years later, it’s still promoted “Your city within the city,” a 58-story monolith with more than 400 multimillion-dollar units in San Francisco’s tallest residential building.
“It was billed as one of the top 10 most luxurious buildings in the world,” former Millennium resident Frank Jernigan recalled.
But, since it opened, the hulking blue-gray tower has sunk 18 inches into the soft downtown soil on which it was built – and it’s tilting, according to the Millennium’s current engineer, Ronald Hamburger.
Now, amid reports suggesting the deadly collapse of the Champlain Towers South more than 3,000 miles away in Surfside, Florida, began in the building’s lower reaches, questions are being raised about the Bay Area tower’s structural integrity.
“When you have a high rise that collapses and you had a situation in San Francisco – we had a high rise that was sinking and tilting – it affects people’s peace of mind,” said attorney Niall McCarthy. He represented about 100 Millennium Tower residents who reached a mediated settlement in 2020 with developers and others to a lawsuit claiming their property values plummeted with news of the sinking.
Millennium engineer: Surfside comparisons ‘reckless and premature’
Hamburger, who has monitored the settlements of the Millennium Tower and evaluated their effect on the structure since 2014, told CNN in a statement that the building was designed for earthquake resistance, remains safe and is not at risk of collapse.
“The collapse of the residential building in Surfside … was tragic, but it is far too early to speculate about what caused that disaster – and any potential comparisons with Millennium Tower would be reckless and premature,” Hamburger said.
“Millennium Tower was designed to stringent earthquake resistance standards and is a much tougher form of construction than typical buildings in Florida, which are not required to be designed for earthquake resistance,” he added. “I can state with confidence that settlements experienced by Millennium Tower have not compromised its stability and safety.”
A $100 million fix, set to be completed next year, involves the installation