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.
San Francisco Hasn't Designated a New Landmark District Since 2018
The city has named 56 individual buildings historic landmarks since then, 14 of them this year. It has not named a single new landmark district in almost eight years, the fourth-longest gap in the register's 54-year history, and closing on third.
BY EMMETT GRADY, HISTORY CORNER
Clyde and Crooks are two half-block alleys in SoMa, lined with brick warehouses built to store cargo off the docks after the 1906 earthquake, and in December 2018 they became the last piece of San Francisco the city has protected as a landmark district.
In the seven years and eight months since, San Francisco has designated 56 individual buildings as Article 10 landmarks, 14 of them so far this year. It has designated zero new landmark districts, the tool the city uses to protect a whole block or streetscape rather than one building at a time. The city's preservation apparatus never stopped moving. It stopped moving at that scale.
The register is small: fourteen districts total, the first drawn around Jackson Square in 1972, the newest around Clyde and Crooks in 2018. Gaps between them have never been even. The shortest ran 57 days, between Market Street Masonry and Duboce Park in 2013. The longest ran just over a decade, between Dogpatch (2003) and Market Street Masonry (2013). At 2,814 days and still running, the current gap is already the fourth-longest quiet stretch in the register's history, trailing only the pause after Civic Center that ended with Dogpatch (8.3 years), the pause after Jackson Square that ended with Webster Street (8.7 years), and that ten-year run to Market Street Masonry. Two hundred and twenty-four more days without a new district, and this one moves into third.
What the individual-landmark count rules out is neglect. Fifty-six buildings landmarked one at a time since the last district, a pace that never dipped below single digits in any calendar year and hit a dozen twice, is not what a preservation department running out of interest looks like. The likelier reason the district tool sits idle is procedural rather than mysterious: one building can be landmarked on the strength of one owner, or the Planning Department, pushing it through, while a district needs consent, or at least no organized opposition, from every parcel on the block, a far heavier lift in a city mid-argument over whether old buildings should be allowed to block new housing. Whatever the mix of reasons, it is not that the city stopped caring about old buildings. It is that it stopped, for going on eight years, deciding that a whole block of them was worth protecting at once.
WORTH LEAVING THE HOUSE FOR
Envelop. A nonprofit listening room inside The Midway, thirty-two speakers arranged around the audience for full-album, start-to-finish plays. The IRS granted it nonprofit status in February 2016, it opened its doors in 2017, and its own ticketing platform counts more than 1,700 listening events held there since. A reader who tipped the paper off, @majamediaco on X, put it best: “you can feel how carefully every sonic choice has been matched to the emotional charge of each song.” The room is shoeless and seated by house rule, capacity kept deliberately low, and a night’s program is one record played beginning to end, not a set list.
Bayview Hunters Point · 900 Marin Street, inside The Midway, enter from the Michigan Street side · tickets from $27.13 · envelop.us
Coming up: Radiohead’s “OK Computer,” August 20 · Frank Ocean’s “Blonde,” August 22 · Pink Floyd’s “The Dark Side of the Moon,” August 24.
Recommended via @majamediaco on X. Tell the desk where you love going: reply anywhere the paper reaches you.
SOURCES & RECEIPTS
1. U.S. Department of Labor, Office of Foreign Labor Certification, LCA Disclosure Data FY2026 Q1 (Oct 1-Dec 31, 2025) and FY2025 Q1 (Oct 1-Dec 31, 2024), filtered to WORKSITE_CITY = San Francisco, pulled August 17, 2026. 2,044 and 2,229 SF-worksite rows respectively; address and employer breakdowns, wage figures ($87,500-$543,344 annual, median $234,300 among Salesforce's 129 annual-rate filings at the address), and case-status counts in receipts.json. 2. Salesforce Tower lease and construction history: Wikipedia, "Salesforce Tower" (citing contemporaneous real-estate reporting), and San Francisco Examiner, "Salesforce Tower, SF's tallest edifice, opens for business," both pulled August 17, 2026.
2. San Francisco Planning Department via DataSF, Landmarks Listed in Article 10 of the San Francisco Planning Code (data.sfgov.org/resource/97yj-54sx), 370 records, grouped by year designated, pulled August 17, 2026. 4. SF Planning, Landmark Districts (data.sfgov.org/resource/knm6-5ej6, the working table behind the broken vnrd-fpg7 map view), 14 districts, cross-checked against SF Planning's own current districts page (sfplanning.org/resource/article-10-and-article-11-districts), which independently confirms no district has been designated since Clyde and Crooks; and San Francisco Planning Code Article 10, Appendix O (Clyde and Crooks Warehouse Historic District), all pulled August 17, 2026. Full date list and gap calculations in receipts.json.
The Frisconian · Published from forty-nine square miles surrounded by reality · @deaconsanti