No, the Millennium Tower that’s trending on Facebook is not the one in Boston

Turns out, it's the Millennium Tower in San Francisco that's in the news.

The Millennium Tower in San Francisco. Beck Diefenbach / Reuters

By Megan Turchi

1 minute to read

You may have seen “Millennium Tower” trending on Facebook and wondered what was going on at the Downtown Crossing luxury building. Turns out, it’s the Millennium Tower in San Francisco that’s in the news.

San Fran’s 58-story Millennium Tower, a residential building that opened in 2009, has sunk about 16 inches into landfill, according to the Associated Press. It’s even garnered the nickname “The Leaning Tower of San Francisco” because it’s now tilting multiple inches to the northwest.

And now, a new satellite image from the European Space Agency shows that the tower is actually sinking faster than people originally thought.

The image provided by the European Space Agency ESA shows the Millennium Tower in San Francisco on the base of modified Copernicus Sentinel satellite data. The colored dots represent targets observed by the radar. The color scale ranges from 40 mm a year away from radar (red) to 40 mm a year toward radar (blue). Green represents stable targets. – ESA SEOM INSARAP study/ESA via AP

According to the Associated Press, the European Space Agency’s new information suggests that the building might be sinking at nearly double the one-inch-per-year rate engineers originally estimated. In fact, between April 2015 and September 2016, it sunk between 2.6 and 2.9 inches.

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According to The New York Times, San Francisco’s city attorney recently filed a lawsuit against the building’s developers for failing to tell new tenants how much the Millennium Tower was actually sinking.

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