San Francisco needs to act now
Wapiganapo tembo nyasi huumia is a Swahili proverb that, roughly translated, says: When elephants battle, the grass gets trampled.
Sitting in the San Francisco Board of Supervisors hearing on the sinking Millennium Tower Sept. 22, I couldn’t help but feel like the trampled grass beneath the behemoths of the city of San Francisco and Millennium Partners Development Group.
On the one hand, the Board of Supervisors, in an effort initiated by Supervisor Aaron Peskin, is seeking to discover how it is possible that a building of the magnitude and stature of the Millennium Tower could be permitted and constructed without the requirement to anchor in bedrock.
On the other hand, Millennium Partners, a multibilliondollar development enterprise, continues construction in San Francisco and in other U.S. cities, while failing miserably to step up to the plate, acknowledge its culpability and move aggressively to rectify this egregious and potentially disastrous mistake.
Meanwhile, we who live in the Millennium Tower are faced with the daunting prospect of losing of our homes, years of litigation and millions of dollars in fees for lawyers and expert witnesses, in an effort to hold accountable those responsible for this untenable situation. While Millennium Partners continues to enrich itself with new and potentially flawed buildings, and the city looks to us to understand where it failed and where new policy will guide future construction, we at the Millennium Tower remain “trampled in the grass.”
The first we learned that the building was both settling at an alarmingly greater rate than was projected and additionally was tilting was at a specially convened homeowners association meeting in May. Since then, many of us have started doing our own research. What we have learned: Millennium Partners was aware prior to the completion of the building in 2008 that the tower was sinking at a greater-than-projected rate. No disclosures of the sinking or tilting were made either orally through real estate agents or in documents presented at closing.
The city also knew as much as six years ago that the building was sinking much more than anticipated, and also failed to disclose this to the public or to the more than 400 individuals, families and entities that purchased units.
The city needs to make Millennium Partners accountable, even if it means halting construction on other Millennium Partners projects in the city. Who will pay for the fix and who is at fault can be resolved by the “elephants” in the inevitable legal and insurance battles that will follow.
The city needs to accept responsibility as well. It has engaged in wholesale building and construction on land reclaimed from the bay without having proper procedural standards and policies that assure the integrity of these buildings and the safety of their inhabitants and those surrounding them.
In the meantime, the Millennium Tower needs an immediate fix — before the building sinks below some unknown threshold that will trigger widespread failure of elevators, electrical and sewage systems and ultimately, building condemnation.