From today’s San Francisco Business Times:
Veteran developers chase high-profile Transbay office site
Adam Weintraub, Contributor- San Francisco Business Times
June 26, 2014
The proposals for Block 5 — an area bounded by Howard, Main, Beale and Natoma streets that includes some privately owned parcels — were due Wednesday afternoon to the Office of Community Investment and Infrastructure.
Block 5 is one of approximately a dozen parcels of prime state-owned land near the $1.9 billion Transbay Transit Center that the OCII is selling to private developers. The parcels became available following the rebuilding of the transit center. The multi-modal transit station is scheduled to open in 2017, but has already started to shape the city’s real estate landscape as the heart of the city’s economic activity has shift south.
OCII this spring issued a request for proposals to buy the publicly owned parts of Block 5 and build an office tower of about 700,000 square feet with 10,000 square feet of retail. At least a half-dozen development teams considered making proposals or attended meetings on the project, but in the end four submitted pitches:
- Boston Properties with Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates
- Golub Real Estate and The John Buck Co. with Goettsch Partners and Solomon Cordwell Buenz Architecture
- Jay Paul Co. with SOM
- Kilroy Realty with Pelli Clarke Pelli Architects
Several of the developers and architects submitting proposal already have a footprint in the Transbay district.
Boston Properties and Hines are building the 1.4 million-square-foot Transbay Tower, which was designed by Pelli Clarke Pelli, which also designed the adjacent transit center; the tower will rise more than 1,100 feet high at completion and now is known as the Salesforce Tower with the software company’s lease in April of more than half the space in the building. Kilroy Realty is building a tower at 350 Mission St. at Fremont while Golub is building 409 units of market-rate housing on Blocks 6 and 7(see slideshow above). Jay Paul Co. is building 417,000 square feet of office at 181 Fremont St. near Howard.
The Block 5 proposals also were to include plans for open space near the building and on a sliver of land running along Beale Street toward Mission Street. Details of the proposals were not immediately available. No hotel or residential space at all is permitted in the proposals, according to OCII documents.
Proposals must be evaluated by OCII using a formula that gives the heaviest weight to the purchase price, but also considers elements such as the design, development team’s experience and familiarity with programs to emphasize use of economically disadvantaged and local businesses and workers. All four proposals list workforce consultants as part of the teams.
The Transbay Joint Powers Authority’s schedule calls for selling the land by September 2015, and proposals were to assume that an agreement for exclusive negotiations with one of the teams would be struck in August.