Vol. I, No. 25 · San Francisco — MONDAY, AUGUST 17, 2026 · Price: prevailing wage, no more

BY MAXINE DOLAN, CITY DESK

415 Mission Street rises 1,070 feet over the Financial District, the tallest building in San Francisco, and last quarter it was the address on more H-1B visa sponsorship filings than any other block in the city.

Between October and December 2025, employers filed 144 of San Francisco's 2,044 H-1B sponsorship filings with a worksite at that one tower, 7.0 percent of every skilled-visa filing in the city. A year earlier, the same address carried more filings in absolute terms, 164 of 2,229 (7.4 percent), before the building's own total fell alongside the city's, 12.2 percent against the citywide 8.3 percent. These are Labor Condition Applications, the wage-and-worksite disclosure an employer files with the Department of Labor before it can even petition for the actual visa, so the count measures paperwork, not headcount added. What did not shrink was Salesforce's hold on the building itself: the company filed 130 of this quarter's 144, up from 124 of 164 a year earlier, so its share of the tower's own paperwork rose from three-quarters to nine in ten even as the building emptied out around it. Of Salesforce's 130 filings, 127 were continuing employment: workers already sponsored, filing again to keep an existing visa current, not a hiring wave.

The dominance was decided once. On April 11, 2014, four years before a single tenant moved in, Salesforce signed a fifteen-and-a-half-year lease worth $560 million for 714,000 square feet of a building then still called Transbay Tower, and took the naming rights with it. The tower opened January 8, 2018: sixty-one floors, 97 percent leased on day one. Every quarter since, whatever else has moved through downtown San Francisco's office market, the paperwork keeps arriving at the same address a decade-old real-estate decision pointed it toward.

Nowhere else in the city comes close individually, and this quarter's runners-up read like a company directory of the moment. Amazon's offices at 525 Market Street filed 49, down from 87 a year earlier. Uber filed 46 at 1725 Third Street. Anthropic, three years old, filed 45 at 500 Howard Street. OpenAI filed 38 at 1455 Third Street. LinkedIn filed 35 at 222 Second Street. 415 Mission Street's 144 is nearly three times the second-place address, though the next five busiest addresses combined, 213 filings spread across five different companies, do add up to more than the tower's total. What none of them have is a single company behind nine in ten of its filings, the way Salesforce has at 415 Mission.

None of this means Salesforce is hiring at the tower faster than it did last year; the opposite is closer to true, since 127 of its 130 filings were continuing status rather than new positions. What it means is narrower and more durable: a single 2014 real-estate decision still determines where a meaningful share of San Francisco's highest-skilled, visa-sponsored workforce physically sits, twelve years and one pandemic-era office exodus later. The lease has outlasted the tenant's hiring cycle. It has not yet outlasted its own terms.