Mission Bay construction booming

by Kate Williamson, The Examiner

SAN FRANCISCO - It isn’t every day a city can watch a whole neighborhood, let alone a high-density downtown extension, spring up out as though the city was new. But that is happening in The City’s new biotech cradle, San Francisco’s Mission Bay Redevelopment Area.

Several private office, laboratory and residential projects were completed at the end of 2006 and construction began on others, with union construction workers, in the estimated “high hundreds,” employed on the work, Building and Construction Trades Council spokesman Michael Theriault said.

Lowe Enterprises has begun work on its new building at 500 Terry A. Francois Blvd., a 300,000-square-foot Class-A speculative office space development with some 8,000 square feet of retail space on the ground floor, Lowe senior VP Andrew Segal said. The company acquired the project in August 2006 with permits already in place from the former Catellus Development Corp., now ProLogis (PLD), the lead developer of Mission Bay. The foundations are in place, and aboveground construction has now begun, Segal said.

“The office market has been steadily improving for two and half years now,” he said. “We feel good about the market and wanted to get the new space as quickly as we could.”

It is Lowe’s first development in Mission Bay; it also owns 300 California St.

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