San Francisco’s Humboldt Bank Building won’t be converted into housing after all.
The Seligman Group, owner of 785 Market Street, instead plans to lease the 19-story, 90,600-square-foot building as offices, the San Francisco Business Times reported. The proposed residential conversion spearheaded by Forge Development Partners last year would’ve brought 124 units of housing to the buzzing business corridor.
Earlier this month, San Francisco-based Forge agreed to terminate its exclusive right to pursue the office-to-residential conversion at the site because it wasn’t able to secure enough financing to grab a requisite equity stake in the building. The deal was slated to close last year.
Still, Forge isn’t backing down from its plan entirely and hopes to make it happen at some point down the road.
“Although the city has made extraordinary progress in trying to support conversions of existing buildings to housing, the equity markets for this remain challenging, resulting in delays in the process,” Forge CEO Richard Hannum told the outlet. “We expect to continue and eventually make this conversion work. But in the interim, the building needs to proceed.”
Seligman recently completed a $4 million revamp of the building’s elevators and converted the second floor into a tenant lounge. A Seligman affiliate first acquired the building in 1997 and refinanced it in 2022 with a $20.5 million loan; it’s in the middle of another refinancing process now. The building is about 40 percent leased.
A deal for Forge to acquire Wells Fargo’s downtown headquarters was in the works earlier this year but fell through. That would’ve seen the firm converting the 409,000-square-foot building into housing. Redco is now under contract for that building with plans to keep it as offices.
The city has only approved two large-scale conversion projects, one of them being Forge’s proposal for 785 Market. The other, a plan to turn 30,000 square feet at the Warfield Building at 988 Market into 40 homes, was scuttled after the Community Arts Stabilization Trust and KALW Public Media bought the building in February to use as office and creative space.