530 Sansome, a 41-story project with a hotel, offices, retail and a fire station in San Francisco’s Financial District, was just approved.
Courtesy of Brick
A 41-story tower, a luxury hotel, a fire station and a public plaza — all stacked on a half-acre site — is the kind of complicated, collaborative development that cities either avoid or embrace out of necessity.
But for the project coming to 530 Sansome in the Financial District, San Francisco is choosing the latter.
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Mark Schwettmann, the project lead from Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, or SOM, has watched all of these pieces come together since 2017. The result is a public-private partnership between t…
530 Sansome, a 41-story project with a hotel, offices, retail and a fire station in San Francisco’s Financial District, was just approved.
Courtesy of Brick
A 41-story tower, a luxury hotel, a fire station and a public plaza — all stacked on a half-acre site — is the kind of complicated, collaborative development that cities either avoid or embrace out of necessity.
But for the project coming to 530 Sansome in the Financial District, San Francisco is choosing the latter.
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Mark Schwettmann, the project lead from Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, or SOM, has watched all of these pieces come together since 2017. The result is a public-private partnership between the city and Related California, a large real estate development firm, that bundles this unlikely combo: up to 390,000 square feet of office space, 200 hotel rooms, ground-floor retail, and a four-story, state-of-the-art fire station to replace the aging Station 13.
530 Sansome, a 41-story project with a hotel, offices, retail and a fire station in San Francisco’s Financial District, was just approved.
Courtesy of SOM
“The unique factors in San Francisco that make development difficult were leading people to find these interesting synergies between public and private and different kinds of uses,” said Schwettmann on a call with SFGATE this week. With a project of this magnitude, the complexity isn’t just architectural; it’s financial. The fire station will be funded through future hotel tax revenue instead of upfront money from the city, and the project is set to generate nearly $15 million in affordable housing funds.
Mayor Daniel Lurie signed legislation on Oct. 27 to advance the development, which the Board of Supervisors had approved unanimously. “Downtown drives San Francisco’s economy, and a thriving downtown where people can live, work, play, and learn will be key to our city’s comeback,” Lurie said in a news release.
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530 Sansome, a 41-story project with a hotel, offices, retail and a fire station in San Francisco’s Financial District, was just approved.
Courtesy of Brick
The timing matters. The Financial District has been likened to a ghost town, and questions persist about its future in the wake of the pandemic and rise of work-from-home culture. Office leasing and return-to-office numbers have improved, but recovery remains fragile, and large, new construction has been nearly nonexistent.
All this makes the 544-foot tower at 530 Sansome an outlier. “I think it is such a great symbol for the city to be building a new building in the financial district, which people have written off for a long time,” Schwettmann said. The hotel will be the first totally new five-star hotel since the St. Regis opened — a project Schwettmann worked on early in his career at SOM. “It’s been 25 years since then, so I think the market is ready for it,” he said.
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SOM’s design reflects changing expectations for offices. The building will be concrete, not steel like many older office buildings in San Francisco. “It’s an innovative type of structure that’s both very earthquake resistant, but also provides really high ceilings,” he said.
530 Sansome, a 41-story project with a hotel, offices, retail and a fire station in San Francisco’s Financial District, was just approved.
Courtesy of uViz
The fire station at 447 Battery St. is set to be a healthier building and will include “very sophisticated and sort of overpowered” ventilation systems designed to protect firefighters from exhaust fumes in vehicle bays — a measure added to address heightened cancer rates among firefighters that fire departments, the city and public works have become aware of.
The city expects the development “to generate more than $800 million in annual economic activity” and to create around 400 construction jobs each year during the build and 1,600 full-time positions upon completion. In the next quarter-century, the city projects it will produce “$13.5 million annually in new general fund revenue.”
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530 Sansome, a 41-story project with a hotel, offices, retail and a fire station in San Francisco’s Financial District, was just approved.
Courtesy of uViz
According to Schwettmann, the site near buzzy Jackson Square is “really the last place you could do this in the Financial District.”
“I think when you look at skyscrapers of old, you know, they were aspirational, they were soaring,” he mused. “We kind of got away from that a little bit.”
Nov 1, 2025
Local Editor
Kasia Pawlowska is an award-winning writer and SFGATE’s local editor. She lives in San Francisco’s Sunset District with her husband and dog. Send her an email at kasia.pawlowska@sfgate.com.