The 310-Foot Standstill

Before the first steel column could climb into the San Francisco skyline, David M. Wilson confronted difficult ground conditions. Wilson, a vice president at Clark Construction Group-California, was overseeing foundation work for Salesforce Tower on landfill near the city's original waterfront—ground susceptible to earthquake liquefaction and settlement. His teams were tasked with drilling 310 feet into bedrock to place 42 massive load-bearing elements, only to run into voids and soft tops that Wilson later identified as a major contributor to a six-month schedule delay.

That underground standstill points directly to a listener's question about how the Empire State Building opened in 1931 after just 18 months of building, while Salesforce Tower took from 2013 to 2018. The route follows that puzzle from downtown foundation work into macroeconomic ledgers, tracing what modern high-rises actually gained as construction schedules expanded.

Economists call this the construction productivity puzzle. Between 1970 and 2020, economy-wide labor productivity nearly tripled while manufacturing productivity grew over nine-fold, but construction value added per worker dropped by 30 to 40 percent. Rather than accelerating alongside other modern industries, building output per worker experienced a persistent multi-decade decline.

The sheer scale of the work illustrates that divergence. In 1930, high-rises could be erected with large workforces assembling multiple floors in a single week. By contrast, Salesforce Tower absorbed over 2.5 million man-hours, with the foundation contractor noting that each of its 42 foundation elements alone required three to five days of continuous work. To understand how that gap opened, the next step is an audit of the calendar to see whether Salesforce Tower really took five years to build.

The public story says Salesforce Tower took five long years to build, but the construction logs tell a sharper tale. The ceremonial groundbreaking took place in March 2013, after the city approved the 1.4-million-square-foot tower in November 2012. Below-grade drilling started late that year, and the doors officially opened on January 8th, 2018. The actual physical work took roughly four to five years, not a sprawl of endless construction.

The feeling of a decade-long wait came from what happened long before the first shovel hit dirt. Hines won the rights to the site in an international competition back in 2007. Then the Great Recession hit in late 2008, collapsing real estate values and freezing the plan. Paul Paradis, a senior managing director at Hines, later recalled that the team knew immediately the price was too high and the timing too short. Paradis noted looking back that the development phase was tougher than physical construction, with the exception of the foundation element issues.

The Empire State Building, by contrast, was a sprint driven by a speculative race. Completed in just 18 months, it was reportedly pushed forward by teams assembling four floors per week to cut carrying costs on construction loans. In the race to top the Chrysler Building, developers added extra stories despite warnings from financial forecasts, only for the tower to sit mostly vacant throughout the decade, even though exact historical supply records and worker injury tallies remain unrecorded.

That kind of unchecked speed vanished half a century ago. Construction industry productivity peaked in 1968 before starting a long decline. In 1970, California enacted the California Environmental Quality Act, signed by Governor Ronald Reagan, reportedly requiring public reviews of environmental impacts. Around that same time, as economists have noted, American cities adopted increasingly restrictive zoning and complex life-safety building codes.

This stretching of schedules was not confined to California. Across 29 advanced economies tracked between 1996 and 2019, 16 recorded negative average productivity growth in construction. In Australia, a Productivity Commission report said that most of the time taken by some housing developments is spent in approvals rather than physical assembly. Yet the calendar only explains when work happens; to understand why high-rises take so long today, one must step past the permits and look directly inside the walls.

Look past the schedules, and the physical difference between these two eras becomes stark. Early North American skyscrapers built through 1930 were largely straightforward structural skeletons, heated by basic steam radiators and ventilated through operable windows, before designs like San Antonio's Milam Building opened in 1928 with high-rise central air conditioning. Today, engineers who view modern towers as intricate machines point out that tall buildings face constraints unheard of a century ago. Taller designs must actively balance stack effects, electrical voltage drop, and temperature variations driven by height. In plumbing alone, engineers note that hydrostatic pressure zoning becomes necessary once a building exceeds roughly ten storeys, splitting water supply lines into separate zones to manage hydrostatic pressure.

Salesforce Tower illustrates that transformation. The tower was designed around a reinforced concrete core and a steel frame wrapped in a glass curtain wall, anchored by a concrete slab foundation fourteen feet thick. Because its seismic-resisting system relied on shear walls, the project fell under San Francisco’s Administrative Bulletin 083, requiring an independent expert panel to review the structural design. Engineers used performance-based seismic design, relying on advanced nonlinear computer modeling to evaluate how the skyscraper would endure multiple predicted earthquakes before a single bucket of concrete was poured.

Inside that engineered core, the complexity multiplies. Engineers argue that modern mechanical, electrical, and plumbing systems have grown so dense and spatially demanding that they must be integrated before structural framing is set. Ductwork, piping, conduit runs, and fire sprinklers compete for tight interstitial space around elevator hoistways and structural shear walls. When conflicts are discovered late on site, retrofitting structural support can force expensive redesigns and disrupt the entire floor assembly.

Digital innovations have helped manage that spatial puzzle, but they cannot build the tower themselves. As Federal Reserve Vice Chair Michael Barr noted, the industry has widely adopted computer-aided design and building information modeling, yet those platforms primarily improve coordination and data management. They do not fundamentally change the physical, labor-intensive work of pouring concrete, setting steel, and wiring ceilings by hand. And that gap between digital design and manual reality points directly toward a much wider macroeconomic puzzle.

The gap between digital promise and physical reality shows up clearly on the national balance sheet. Economists Austan Goolsbee and Chad Syverson documented that between 1970 and 2020, United States construction value added per worker dropped by about 40 percent. Over those same decades, manufacturing productivity climbed more than nine-fold.

That drop is not merely a quirk of price deflators or imperfect data. Even when counting physical output, the number of single-family housing units built per construction employee fell from 2.63 in the early 1990s to 2.35 by 2020. The sector divergence remained sharp across broader categories as well, with industrial building productivity expanding while multifamily residential construction dropped.

Those extended schedules carry serious macroeconomic weight. Reportedly, construction loans accrue interest as time drags on, and research cited in 2022 estimated that construction's productivity slowdown alone accounted for about one-third of the total decline in trend American GDP growth since World War II.

In dense cities, compounding delays drive costs to extraordinary heights. San Francisco reached construction costs of 473 dollars per square foot as of 2023—the second highest in the world—with reports that about 50,000 housing units, many of them approved, were stalled in the pipeline because building them was not economically feasible. That mounting backlog forces a harder question: is modern construction stalling under layers of government bureaucracy, or because erecting high-tech towers has become fundamentally bespoke engineering?

That drag brings us straight into a fierce debate over what is truly stalling modern towers: government bureaucracy or bespoke physical complexity. How much of the slowdown comes from rules rather than physical building remains impossible to separate precisely, because project data does not isolate an exact percentage. But advocates who point to regulatory bloat argue the administrative burden is severe. A Federal Reserve study examining thousands of commercial projects found that cost-weighted planning lags averaged more than 28 months, with local approval delays adding seven months in more regulated jurisdictions. Across the broader economy, Goldman Sachs Research estimated that accumulated American regulation since the 1960s reduced annual construction productivity growth, with approval delays imposing the heaviest drag.

In San Francisco, municipal records show housing permits issued between 2024 and 2025 took a median of 280 days, with 16 percent of applications enduring five or more review rounds across several agencies. Permit expediters cite hyper-detailed obstacles, like narrow city-approved dirt-hauling windows that stretch schedules by months. Former California Governor Jerry Brown once called environmental review reform "the Lord's work," openly remarking that "it's easier to build in Texas" because unions regularly use review laws as a hammer to extract project labor agreements.

Yet engineers and builders argue that blaming paper pushers misses the physical reality of the site. As Bay Area real estate attorney Andrew Junius put it, "This isn’t like making cookies. Every project is different. Every building is different." Towers are not manufactured on assembly lines; they must anchor into unique, unpredictable dirt.

Salesforce Tower's own foundation challenges illustrate that side of the argument, stemming from the difficult mechanics of drilling 310 feet into bedrock. General contractor vice president David M. Wilson reported that foundation problems were a major contributor to a six-month construction delay after camera inspections revealed a basketball-sized void and other anomalies, forcing engineers to remediate the tops of all 42 load-bearing elements. Later, strong winds triggered tower-crane shutdowns, which Wilson said cost roughly another month to a month and a half on the upper exterior wall.

Once out of the ground, life-safety mandates demand rigorous verification that cannot simply be rushed. Before any tenant moves in, the San Francisco Fire Department witnesses mandatory smoke-control acceptance tests, where supply and exhaust fans must prove they can protect stairwells under simulated fire emergencies; late test failures can hold up occupancy by four to eight weeks. The standoff leaves open the ultimate question of what all this extra time actually buys us.

That balance between speed and oversight faces urgent scrutiny as cities run short on housing. In San Francisco, three years into an eight-year cycle aimed at accommodating 82,000 homes by 2031, the city had produced fewer than 10,000 units. To address permitting bottlenecks, state lawmakers enacted statutory review clocks like Assembly Bill 1114, which took effect in 2024 to impose deadlines on post-entitlement permit reviews.

Yet statutory deadlines alone cannot resolve why building times lengthened while technology surged. As analysts have reported, construction durations did not climb because engineering tools failed. They lengthened because builders no longer stack four floors per week into simple speculative frames with basic steam heat and unexamined seismic risks. Instead, engineers argue modern teams erect integrated vertical machines where structural steel wraps a reinforced concrete core, engineered through computer modeling and life-safety systems designed to protect thousands of lives.

When Salesforce Tower opened in January 2018, it represented over 2.5 million man-hours and a six-month delay to remediate foundation elements. But the payoff arrived days before opening when a magnitude 4.4 earthquake struck nearby Berkeley; the tower's sensors recorded low-amplitude shaking with slight drift and zero structural damage. The extra years did not buy stagnation; they bought a tower engineered to withstand major earthquakes.