Remember how Pinterest wanted to lease 100,000 square feet of office space at 2 Henry Adams Street at Showplace Square in the Design District, forcing the eviction of dozens of small wholesale interior design businesses on month-to-month leases? That deal appears to be dead. As Curbed reports, Pinterest has officially given up that plan and is instead looking to take the same amount of space down the street at 651 Brannan, a recent home of Eventbrite.
Pinterest, the online bulletin board thing for people who like pictures, apparently makes money somehow (?), and is expanding from offices they just moved to at 808 Brannan Street two years ago. Correction: They call themselves a "visual discovery tool." According to the Business Times, they've had a recent "growth spurt" and the company was "valued at $5 billion in May after raising $200 million in new funds."
Some controversy arose over the fact that longtime Design District tenants were getting pushed out in favor of office tenants like Pinterest who could pay a lot more rent. Supervisor Malia Cohen went about trying to kill the Pinterest deal by thwarting the building owner's attempt at getting historic preservation status for 2 Henry Adams Street something that would have exempted the building from zoning that dictates it be used for production, distribution, and repair (PDR), not office.
As of a July meeting of the Board of Supervisors' Land Use & Economic Development Committee, the historic preservation tactic was shut down and the deal was basically dead. But now we get the official word on Pinterest's alternate plan.
Score one for keeping the Design District full of actual design businesses.