Until Tuesday, 27-year-old Jade Kraus paid $1,700 a month for a one-room Hayes Valley studio she shared with her boyfriend. By Tuesday evening, she was paying almost twice as much to live somewhere that would have been unlikely until very recently — near 10th and Market streets.
But now, as she heads to her $3,000-a-month, one-bedroom apartment, she’ll pass a mural commissioned for the building and then ride a smart elevator up to her apartment in the 24-story tower. If she has any issues with, say, her refrigerator, she can call the building’s concierge or just enter a work order into the building’s app before heading to the courtyard for a swim.
The 20 new tenants whose belongings were being unloaded Tuesday in the basement of Kraus’ new home, NEMA (which stands for new Market), are part of the changing face of the mid-Market neighborhood. The area’s city-driven transformation — tax incentives for new businesses and the creation of the Central Market Community Benefit District — is becoming more evident daily. Tuesday was no exception.
Not only were new tenants moving into the futuristic tower directly across the street from Twitter, but cash register-replacement-app creator Square moved into its new digs just west of the NEMA building.
“I’m happy that they’re doing something with this part of San Francisco,” Kraus said. “It was a no man’s land.”
So far, the fully wired NEMA, which began construction in November 2010 and whose assessed value is $78 million, has signed leases with roughly 200 tenants for its first 317-unit apartment tower. A separate 37-story north tower is slated for completion in early 2014, which will ultimately give the whole building 754 rental units.