SF's Oceanwide plan builds offices first and parks 156 condos

Stand at First and Mission today and you see a green-screened fence, a flat concrete deck and Salesforce Tower looking down on it from across the street. That deck is the finished foundation of Oceanwide Center, the two-tower project that stopped in 2020. A filing that reached San Francisco Planning on October 11 says 156 homes will rise here.

They will. Eventually, maybe. All 156 sit in the shorter of the two towers, on the Mission Street side of the lot, and the owners want to turn that footprint into a temporary public plaza until they are ready to build it. The tower that goes first is offices. Around it, the typical home price in Financial District/Barbary Coast rose 17.0 percent in the year through September 2026, according to Houseberry's price history for the neighborhood, while South Beach, a few blocks toward the ballpark, rose 3.5 percent.

So this is a story about what downtown gets when a stalled site restarts: a tower of offices now and housing on a promise. We think the city should approve the restart. It should not count these 156 homes as real until a crane stands on the Mission Street side.

Where the 156 homes actually sit

The lot holds two tower sites over one shared basement, which is already dug and poured. The First Street tower is the one BXP and the San Francisco Recovery Fund unveiled in September as Fifty at First: about 914 feet, designed by Gensler, with roughly 1.52 million square feet of offices and a ground-floor public space. The Recovery Fund bought the whole property for $60 million in January 2026, a fifth of the $296 million Oceanwide Holdings paid in 2015.

The old First Street tower mixed uses. Its Foster + Partners design stacked about 111 condos above the offices, by Wikipedia's count of the 2016 plan (SF YIMBY reported 124 in 2021). Those homes are gone. The redesign is offices all the way up.

The 156 homes in the new filing belong to the second building, the 605-foot, 54-floor Mission Street Tower. The application says that tower is "to remain as it was presented and approved in the 2016 entitlements," and SF YIMBY's October 13 report on the formal plans puts 169 hotel rooms in it alongside the condos.

So why does the city's project database say the site "adds" 156 homes? Because it counts the homes standing on the lot today, and the record's existing-homes field reads 0. Anything on paper shows up as new.

The homes are big. The record lists 378,719 square feet of residential floor area, about 2,400 square feet per home once you divide it out, halls and lobbies included. These are high-floor condos with bay views, priced for the top of the market.

Reported counts for the 2016 plan run from 262 to 280 homes depending on the year and the source, so the cut lands somewhere between 40 and 44 percent. Office space grows by about half under any of them.

The plaza is the honest part of the filing

The application asks for a phasing plan. Until the Mission Street Tower is built, its footprint becomes "interim publicly accessible open space." The filing also drops 88 First Street from the project and tears down what is left of 78 First Street for a second open space along First.

We would take a plaza over a fence. Six years of chain-link at the foot of the city's tallest building did nobody any good.

But a plaza is also the cheapest thing an owner can keep for a decade. Nothing in the record sets a start date for the Mission Street Tower. A 605-foot hotel and condo tower has to pencil on its own, and big three-bedroom luxury condos are a slow product to sell downtown. The Recovery Fund and BXP are making a reasonable bet: build the offices that tenants are leasing now, and hold the housing as an option. Reasonable for them. For a city short of homes, an option is a thin promise.

What it does to the blocks around First and Mission

The site sits where several of Houseberry's San Francisco neighborhoods meet, and most of them score low on safety. Financial District/Barbary Coast scores 2.3 out of 5, 87th of the 92 neighborhoods on Houseberry's San Francisco ranking. Yerba Buena scores 2.2 and South of Market 1.9. South Beach does better at 3.5. Averaged, those four come to about 2.5, against 3.8 for the city as a whole.

Office towers fill sidewalks from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. Homes and a hotel fill them at night and on weekends, which is when these blocks feel emptiest. The building being deferred is the one that would do more for the street.

Prices around the site split. The typical Financial District/Barbary Coast home went from about $1.44 million in October 2025 to about $1.69 million in September 2026, close to the citywide pace of 16.4 percent on Houseberry's San Francisco city page. South Beach went from about $1.19 million to $1.23 million. That leaves South Beach roughly 44 percent below the citywide typical of about $2.20 million in September.

None of that is the tower's doing. It has not been approved. The gap says South Beach's waterfront condo towers have not joined the citywide run, and 156 more high-end condos next door, whenever they come, will compete with exactly that stock.

Who decides, and when

The record is assigned to planner Jennifer Lung. Environmental review is a Community Plan Evaluation, which checks the project against the environmental report the city already did for the 2012 Transit Center District Plan instead of starting a new one. The application also carries companion requests for a downtown project authorization, an office space allocation, a shadow review and a variance. All of those go to the Planning Commission. As of November 2, no hearing date is posted.

We would approve the office tower. The foundation is in, the land changed hands at a price that lets a tower pencil, and a 914-foot building beside the transit center is the right use of this lot. What we would not do is let anyone call this a 156-home project. Until the Mission Street Tower pulls a building permit, it is an office tower with a plaza, and the homes are a line in a 2016 approval.

Are any of the 156 homes affordable? The record lists 0 affordable homes on site and does not say how the city's affordable housing requirement would be met. That is the question we would want answered at the hearing.

When the commission sets a date, the 156 homes will be the headline. Before then, see how Financial District/Barbary Coast and South Beach compare with the city's other 90 neighborhoods on Houseberry's San Francisco neighborhood ranking.

Sources

• DataSF, San Francisco Planning project record 2026-008984PRJ
• SF Planning Property Information Map, record 2026-008984PRJ
• SF YIMBY: Formal Application For 56-Story Tower at Fifty at First
• Wikipedia: Oceanwide Center, San Francisco (2016 program and history)