Donor of $100M for San Francisco Artists Enclave Revealed

An 81-year-old philanthropist in San Francisco has plunked down $100 million in cash to fund a 16-story, 100-percent affordable housing tower for artists.

Mary Miner, widow of Oracle co-founder Robert Miner, donated the money to pay for the affordable artist-housing project at 1687 Market Street, in South of Market, the San Francisco Standard reported, citing unidentified sources.

The project would replace a two-story building occupied by the McRoskey Mattress Company for 99 years.

Initial plans filed last May by Artists Hub on Market and Mercy Housing California called for a 17-story highrise with 102 affordable apartments reserved for artists, a nine-unit hotel area for visiting artists and an artist community, with studios and practice rooms on the first three floors.

The building, billed as “a dynamic hub for artists to enjoy a stable place to live, create and work,” would contain a ground-floor cafe and an 85-seat black box theatre.

Over the summer, the locally based nonprofits scrapped the hotel and lopped off one story, but stuck with the remaining plan, according to SFYimby.

The tower, designed by locally based Mark Cavagnero Associates, would include floor-to-ceiling windows trimmed in white.

Construction, estimated to cost $74.5 million, could start as early as December next year, and be completed by 2027, with streamlined approvals via state housing laws.

But questions remained about the mystery donor behind an anonymous $100 million gift to finance its construction, as reported by the San Francisco Chronicle.

It turns out Miner, matriarch of a prominent San Francisco family, offered the gold.

After Oracle’s Robert Miner died of cancer in 1994, his wife Mary and their children inherited his stake in the software company, then worth $600 million, according to Forbes. The family has a history of giving to local arts organizations, nonprofit filings show.

Miner, along with her children Nicola and Luke, sit on the board of the Baker Street Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to donating to the arts, according to the Standard. The nonprofit donated $1 million in 2022 to the San Francisco Ballet and tens of thousands to other organizations and museums.

Nicola Miner said in an email to the Standard last month that she and her husband, Robert Mailer Anderson, are not involved with the artist-housing project.

Both chair the Miner Anderson Family Foundation, an arts and social justice nonprofit that gave $250,000 to the San Francisco Opera Association, $105,000 to the Los Cenzontles Mexican Arts Center and $25,000 to SFJAZZ in 2022.

In July last year, Mercy Housing California, a unit of a unit of Denver-based Mercy Housing, and Chinatown Community Development Center moved forward with plans to build two towers with 335 affordable homes at 200 Folsom Street, in SoMa.

— Dana Bartholomew