Amazon halts work on SF warehouse after delivery center moratorium

A 725,000-square-foot warehouse was planned for 900 7th Street

From left: Shamann Walton, president, San Francisco Board of Supervisors, and Jeff Bezos, executive chairman, Amazon, in front of the planned warehouse at 900 7th Street (Getty Images, LoopNet, iStock/Illustration by Steven Dilakian for The Real Deal)
From left: Shamann Walton, president, San Francisco Board of Supervisors, and Jeff Bezos, executive chairman, Amazon, in front of the planned warehouse at 900 7th Street (Getty Images, LoopNet, iStock/Illustration by Steven Dilakian for The Real Deal)

Amazon is pausing work on a last-mile warehouse in San Francisco’s Showplace Square after the city imposed an 18-month moratorium on building new delivery facilities amid community opposition.

“We will continue to evaluate our long-term use of the site,” a company spokesperson said. “We will work with our neighbors to look at ways to use the location to serve the community.”

The Board of Supervisors passed the measure in response to Amazon’s plans to build a 725,000-square-foot warehouse at 900 7th Street, the San Francisco Chronicle reported. Prior to the vote, environmentalists, laborers and other neighbors staged a rally in front of City Hall to protest Amazon’s expansion plans.

“The type of jobs we don’t need to have are the Amazon-style poverty jobs that are underpaid, unsafe [and] include no rights at work,” Teamster Jason Rabinowitz told protestors.

Amazon must negotiate a community benefits package if it wants to build in the district, as other waterfront developers have done, said Shamann Walton, president of the Board of Supervisors, who represents the neighborhood where the logistics center will rise.

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“You can go and ask Pier 70. You can ask the (Potrero) Power Station,” Walton said. “If you are going to come into our neighborhoods you are going to talk to the people in the neighborhood. You are going to provide them with community benefits.”

Amazon’s proposal calls for a three-story building tol serve about 200 delivery vans a day for the “last mile” of transit to local customers. It could employ as many as 500 people, mostly drivers and workers to sort and load packages.

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[SFC] — Victoria Pruitt