San Francisco's Leaning Tower: The $100 Million Fix That Didn't Fix It

A fifty-eight-storey luxury tower in San Francisco has sunk more than forty centimetres into the ground since it opened, and tilted far enough that objects placed on a level surface inside its upper floors will visibly roll toward one side of the room. The building is called the Millennium Tower. The fix engineers eventually installed to stop the sinking, a hundred-million-dollar engineering intervention, appears to have made at least part of the problem worse rather than better. This video covers how one of the most expensive condo towers on the West Coast ended up sinking and tilting in full public view: the friction pile foundation that relied on soil grip rather than true bedrock anchoring, the soft bay mud and fill material beneath downtown San Francisco that every tall building in the area has to account for, and the moment in 2016 when engineers confirmed publicly what residents had already started to suspect. We also cover the hundred-million-dollar perimeter pile fix, engineered and installed immediately next to a fully occupied high-rise, and the uncomfortable discovery, after its completion around 2021, that the tower kept leaning anyway. Years of litigation between the developer, the engineers, the city, and the homeowners association followed, and residents who paid millions for the city's most exclusive address found themselves owning units nobody else wanted to buy. Part of an ongoing series on the megaprojects that shouldn't have been possible. Previous entry: Jeddah Tower, the update nobody's talking about. Next: the country that decided, centuries ago, that a quarter of itself would sit below sea level and stay that way. 0:00 Cold open 0:45 The problem 3:00 The solution on paper 6:30 Building it, step by step 11:30 What almost went wrong 13:30 Verdict Link Subscribe now -    / @overbuilt-e9h