Salesforce.com just dropped a bombshell on the Mayor's office, announcing that they are indefinitely suspending plans for that enormous, 14-acre office campus in Mission Bay. Instead, company officials say they are focusing on snagging more office space in downtown S.F. because they're growing faster than the campus can be built.
The announcement may be some sort of bargaining chip, we reckon, as Salesforce was set to go before the planning commission this week to seek more office allotments. But then again this could just be the death of a really enormous project that likely represented a large financial risk for the company.
Critics had called the sprawling Mission Bay campus a "wasteland" and "out-of-scale," and we should note that it would have featured a large, probably windswept plaza, and a giant, pink Jumbotron.
Salesforce is in the process of renovating 400,000 square feet of office space at 50 Fremont Street, and it sounds like they'll be seeking more space downtown after that. As the Business Times points out, the biggest losers in this announcement are developers, consultants, and architects who had big stakes in the project, including Bosa Development, who was part of a team of developers building 1,000 housing units in the area, hoping to attract Salesforce employees; contractor Hathaway Dinwiddie; and architecture firms Legorreta + Legorreta and Flad Architects.
PREVIOUSLY: Mission Bay: Modern Model of Mixed Use Development, or Wasteland?
