Frontier Tower turns vacant Mid-Market office into self-governed hub
A vacant 16-story Mid-Market tower is being remade as a self-governed “vertical village,” with eight co-living floors and a tech-heavy tenant mix.
Frontier Tower is taking shape at 995 Market St. as a test case for what San Francisco can do with a hollowed-out office tower: turn it into housing, events and a self-governing community all at once. Deep Ink Ventures bought the 16-story building in January 2025 for about $11 million, a price of roughly $122 per square foot, and has marketed the project as a “vertical village” for frontier-tech founders, citizens and event hosts.
The biggest physical change is already on paper. In April 2025, permit filings called for eight floors to be converted into eight co-living residences, each occupying a full floor with five bedrooms and shared kitchen, dining and living spaces. The plan would leave about 61,820 square feet for office use, 25,720 square feet for housing and 4,800 square feet for a 16-car garage. That split captures the basic bet behind the project: Mid-Market does not have to be either all offices or all apartments if owners are willing to rework the tower from the inside out.
Frontier Tower’s own materials describe the building as a self-governed, community-oriented campus. A Luma event listing framed it as a 16-floor tower being transformed into a self-governed vertical village, with programming centered on AI, crypto, biotech, robotics, neurotech and longevity. The project’s six-week Viva Frontier Tower pop-up ran from June 20 to August 4, 2025, and helped turn the building into a live experiment in how rules, membership and shared spaces might work inside a private urban compound.
That is what makes the tower more than a quirky real-estate play. San Francisco is still wrestling with a downtown office-vacancy crisis, and the reuse of 995 Market St. sits squarely inside that debate. In a city where thousands of people lived on the streets while an average of 990 supportive housing units sat empty last year, Frontier Tower asks a harder question than whether a vacant building can be filled: who gets to live there, who writes the rules, and whether private “vertical villages” are a practical answer to a civic failure or a cleaner version of separation for the tech economy.
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