NEMA San Francisco: The 37-Story Tower That Bridged Mid-Market

A woman stands on the corner of Tenth and Market on a fog-thick morning in 2020, watching a 37-story tower climb above the low-rise Auto Row buildings that once defined this block. She is watching the neighborhood change in real time.

NEMA—the name refers to the intersection itself—is not a single building but a carefully orchestrated urban gesture: two residential towers of different heights (24 stories and 37 stories), connected by a shared nine-story podium, holding 754 luxury apartments in total. The complex spans from Jessie Street on one side to Market Street on the other, a footprint that signals ambition.

A Neighborhood in Transition

Mid-Market has long occupied an uncertain place in San Francisco's mental map. The area around Tenth Street carried industrial weight, automotive shops, and the kind of vacancy that invites speculation. Twitter's decision to anchor its corporate headquarters two blocks away at 1355 Market Street gave developers and city planners a signal: this corner was worth building on.

NEMA arrived into that moment of uncertainty. The twin towers and the podium connecting them were designed to integrate street life, not isolate it—retail and restaurant space along the ground floor, residential above, each tower serving different market segments within the luxury range.

The Towers and Their Scale

The taller of the two structures, rising to 37 stories on the Market Street side, commands attention from blocks away. Its sibling, the 24-story tower at Jessie and Tenth, feels proportional by contrast. The podium between them anchors the composition, creating a visual rhythm that breaks up what might otherwise feel like isolated monuments.

Together they hold 754 units—a significant residential infusion into a neighborhood that had lost population to displacement, abandonment, and economic uncertainty.

What Changed Here

For decades, Mid-Market was a place people moved through, not to. NEMA didn't reverse that overnight, but it signaled a wager: that density, design, and private capital could create the conditions for a neighborhood to stabilize and eventually thrive. Whether that wager paid off remains a question the neighborhood is still answering.

What do you remember about this corner before the towers went up? If you lived or worked nearby, what shifted for you when NEMA opened?