NorCal Lofts / Neighborhoods
Where the lofts are
Lofts cluster where the industry was — ports, printers, canneries, mills. Four stories, four markets.
01
San Francisco's loft story begins south of Market Street, in a belt of brick-and-timber warehouses, printing plants and maritime storehouses built between the 1860s and 1920s for the port and the rail spurs along the Embarcadero. The city's 1988 live/work ordinance — written to legalize artist housing in industrial zones — became the legal engine of a full conversion boom: the developers of 601 4th Street and architect David Baker effectively invented the San Francisco conversion-loft formula in 1990–91, repeated it at 355 Bryant and the Clock Tower, and by the late 1990s the dot-com wave had made SoMa, South Beach and South Park live/work lofts some of the most sought-after housing in the city. Dogpatch followed in the 2000s as the shipbuilding-era Central Waterfront was rediscovered, capped by the block-square Esprit conversion in 2008.
The buildings: Oriental Warehouse, Clock Tower Lofts, 355 Bryant Street Lofts, 601 Fourth Street Lofts, Cape Horn Lofts, One South Park, Esprit Park Condominiums, Jackson Brewery Lofts.
02
The East Bay's loft movement predates most of San Francisco's: Emeryville and West Oakland's canneries, mills and machine shops emptied out from the 1960s through the 80s, and artists moved in. Oakland architect Thomas Dolan literally wrote the book on live/work design and pioneered the courtyard live/work typology, while Emeryville's permissive zoning made it the Bay Area's live/work laboratory — the Besler Building's 1993 conversion was among the region's first legal ones. A second wave arrived in the 2000s as the San Francisco formula crossed the bay: the Emeryville Warehouse in 1999, West Oakland's Pacific Cannery Lofts in 2009, and purpose-built soft lofts like The Sierra at Jack London Square.
The buildings: California Cotton Mills Studios, Pacific Cannery Lofts, Willow Court Lofts, Emeryville Warehouse Lofts, Besler Building, The Sierra at Jack London Square.
03
Sacramento's loft district is the R Street Corridor, the city's oldest rail corridor — the Sacramento Valley Railroad ran down R Street from 1852 — which grew a spine of warehouses and light industry served straight from the tracks. After decades of dereliction, a 1990s community visioning process under the Capitol Area Development Authority reimagined R Street as a mixed industrial-residential district; the corridor is now a designated historic district where conversions like the Lawrence Warehouse sit alongside breweries, design shops and new-build lofts. North of downtown, the Globe Mills flour complex — silos and all — was rescued in 2008 as the Central Valley's most theatrical conversion.
The buildings: Warehouse Artist Lofts, Lofts at Globe Mills.
04
San Jose was the Santa Clara Valley's fruit-packing capital, and its loft stock carries cannery DNA — the big Del Monte plants along the rail lines west of downtown, and Japantown's packing sheds. True conversions are rarer here than in San Francisco; most of downtown's "lofts" are 2000s new builds, which makes the genuine adaptive-reuse projects — Plant 51 above all — stand out.
The buildings: Plant 51, Mariani Square Lofts.
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