Yesterday
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Not much progress here. Anyone know if this is stalled due to the chinese pulling out of US developments recently?
Skyscraper page has updates, so thought I’d share some of it. It seems that they dug very deep to keep the building sturdy, so I assume that’s what is taking so long in getting the towers to street level.
Images from May and then the other two are from March
These towers will be a beauty
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Beautiful!
Foster consistently delivers banal soporifics for NY. Hopefully, he will not fail with JPMC after he dropped an atomic snooze bomb at 50 HY.
If, in fact, he designed 350 Park, it’s a bases loaded, game winning, grand slam in the bottom of the ninth, which absolves him for the egregious sin committed at 50 HY.
The shorter tower is on hold
The big one is still u/c
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Interesting how everything is moving South of Market. Is it because it’s closer to CalTrans?
San Francisco, United States 18 October 2019
Chinese developer Oceanwide Holdings suspended construction on a 605-foot (184-meter) tower in San Francisco’s Transbay district, one of the city’s largest projects, as it grapples with rising construction costs.
The Beijing company said Wednesday that work has stopped indefinitely on the shorter Tower 2 at its Oceanwide Center project. Oceanwide is studying ways to lower construction costs to resume work. The stalled tower at 512 Mission Street includes 156 condos and a Waldorf-Astoria hotel.
Construction is continuing on a 910-foot (277-meter) office and condo tower that is set to open in mid-2023—about two years later than earlier estimates.
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Done.
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so it was sold from one Beijing company to another Beijing company
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The pending sale of Oceanwide Center, a troubled 2 million-square-foot mixed-use project under construction in downtown San Francisco, has been delayed once more, reportedly because of the Covid-19 pandemic.
The developer, Oceanwide Holdings, announced Tuesday it has agreed to give Hony Capital, a Beijing private equity firm that has the site under contract, until Sept. 30 to close the deal, according to The Real Deal, which attributed the delay to the pandemic.
Hony Capital agreed to pay $1.2 billion for the project in March; it had 15 days past the original June 30 due diligence deadline to close the deal. The Real Deal said the contract contained provisions for additional Covid-related extensions.
Beijing-based Oceanwide has accepted an $850 million loan from its publicly traded parent company, China Oceanwide, to “develop and meet the company’s temporary capital needs,” according to a disclosure filed by the company Tuesday.
The project consists of a 910-foot office and condo tower at 50 First St. and a 600-foot hotel and residential tower at 512 Mission St. The company halted construction on the shorter tower, slated to be a Waldorf Astoria, last fall, citing financial uncertainty.
A groundbreaking ceremony was held in late 2016, but the $1.6 billion project has yet to entirely reach grade. Click here to read a May cover story from our print edition about the embattled project.
After halting construction on the hotel portion, Oceanwide Holdings listed the development — slated to feature San Francisco’s second-tallest skyscraper — for sale last November.
In January, Oceanwide announced an agreement to sell the project to SPF Capital International Limited for about $1 billion, a deal that would have left Oceanwide Holdings with a $276 million loss. SPF had inquired about converting the hotel space in the shorter tower to additional residential units and residential units in the larger tower to office space. The company ultimately pulled out of the deal by March 31 as the pandemic was sweeping the world. SPF was reportedly $200 million shy of closing.
Under the terms of its new agreement with Hony Capital, Oceanwide Holdings is set to receive $700 million upon closing and up to a maximum of $500 million three years later, if the internal rate of return on the development exceeds 20%.
Requests for comment made to Hony Capital and Oceanwide Holdings were not immediately returned on Tuesday.
Stalled again, but people on SSP said they saw workers and activity
Fimiak on SSP
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Wrote this to be a compilation of all the renderings I could possibly find for Oceanwide Center, and a summary of where things stand with the development as of now. Included the facade mock-up from earlier in this thread.
TL;DR summary: Things ain’t great for 50 First, but they ain’t dead.
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Something nice with something crappy. 
Is this project going to be built or not? I can’t seem to figure that out from all the different headlines.
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I’d wager this Foster design never sees the light of day. Oceanside’s creditors seized the project after losing hundreds of millions of dollars on it, so they’ll want to recoup something — I’m sure they’re desperate to sell to a frugal developer who could complete something on this site for cheap. If that happens, I expect this to be redesigned into a simple box.
But the future of office demand in SF is unclear with several downtown companies moving to long-term remote work, so I don’t know if anyone is in a hurry to put up a million square-foot office tower. I wouldn’t be shocked if this became two 500-foot residential towers in ten years’ time.
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