Google will vacate a 28,000-square-foot waterfront office in San Francisco's financial district.

The Mountain View-based tech giant will come hot on Visa's heels and vacate the three-building One Market Plaza at 1 Market Street on the Embarcadero, the San Francisco Chronicle reported. The company expects to leave the building when its lease ends in April.

The 150,000-square-foot One Market Plaza features two high-rise towers with a six-story addition and an 11-story historic building called The Landmark.

Ryan Lamont, a Google spokesman, said the company will move out of One Market's 42-story Spear Tower but will continue to use the landmark building. He declined to comment on how long Google plans to stay there. Many employees are already working from home.

“As we have said before, we are focused on investing efficiently in real estate to meet the current and future needs of our hybrid workforce,” Lamont said in an email to the Chronicle. “We remain committed to our long-term presence in San Francisco.”

Google plans to consolidate much of its operations from One Market into a nearby 37,000-square-foot office building at 345 Spear Street, unnamed sources told the newspaper. The company is expected to renew its lease on that property when it expires next year.

Lamont declined to comment on a possible lease extension for 345 Spear Street.

News of Google's impending exit from One Market Plaza comes five months after New York-based Paramount Group and Blackstone provided a $975 million loan tied to the complex that was due to mature in February.

According to the Chronicle, the partners have reached an agreement to extend the loan for three years, with an option for another year, in exchange for paying off $125 million in debt. Financial details of the deal were not disclosed.

Working out such a deal would probably have been more difficult if Google had announced its withdrawal at the time, an unnamed “market participant” told the newspaper.

“This flagship property continues to generate record levels of rental demand,” an unnamed Paramount and Blackstone spokesperson told the Chronicle. “This space is leased through April 2025 and we are already in active discussions with potential new tenants. We recently extended the loan through 2028 on attractive terms.”

One Market Plaza, where rents are about 20 percent higher than other prime offices, is 92.5 percent occupied and rents are over $100 per square foot.

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Recent lease signings include Capital Research, which renewed 79,000 square feet, Citigroup, which leased 76,000 square feet, Thoma Bravo, which leased 43,000 square feet, and GIC, which signed a lease for 22,000 square feet.

Last year, Autodesk offered 73,000 square feet of the 284,000 square feet it occupies for sublease. Visa, whose lease expires in 2026, also offered its entire 162,000-square-foot headquarters ahead of moving to its new center in Mission Rock.

One Market Plaza was previously owned by Morgan Stanley and the Paramount Group. In 2014, Blackstone bought a 49 percent stake in the complex for $600 million.

— Dana Bartholomew

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Cleve Jones, the LGBTQ activist whose possible eviction from his rent-controlled Castro apartment became a symbol of San Francisco’s housing issues, said he has decided to move out of the flat he’s called home for 12 years by the end of April.

“My physician, my family, my friends all said to me that this is not worth it, this fight to hang onto a place that … doesn’t feel safe” because of a contentious relationship with the new landlord, who will be living upstairs, Jones, 67, said. “I have limited energy and important work that brings me joy. I’m not going to spend the next, who knows how many months, fighting against this woman.”

The situation began when a new owner, Lily Pao Kue, 30, bought the Castro duplex in February for $1,585,000. After installing security cameras, Kue said she had determined that Jones no longer lived there as a primary dwelling because he only showed up briefly over the course of a month. She said Jones’ flatmate Brenden Chadwick appeared to be the sole occupant and termed him an illegal subletter.

Kue invoked the state’s Costa-Hawkins law, which lets landlords raise rent on vacant units to market rate, and notified Jones that she was more than doubling his $2,393 rent to $5,200 as of July 1.

Jones, who is HIV-positive, said he had been protecting his health by spending time in isolation during the pandemic at a house he owns in Guerneville.

San Francisco remains the center of his work, medical care and community, Jones said.

After moving out of the disputed duplex, he will continue to live with Chadwick in the city, Jones said. Chadwick, who shared the Castro apartment with Jones for the past 3½ years, has already found another place.

“He and his dog are my family,” Jones said.

Jones and Kue each accuse the other of harassment, and each said they thought they would prevail if the case went before the San Francisco Rent Board.

Kue, who came to the US as a toddler when her Hmong family was admitted as refugees, said she’s dismayed as being perceived as a rich, entitled real estate speculator, noting that she worked hard to get where she is. She said she wants to live in the upstairs unit and move her mother and grandmother into the downstairs one.

Kue said she is both “mistrustful” and “hopeful” after receiving Jones’ notice to move out, noting that he had previously changed his mind about whether or not to stay.

“I will only be relieved when I’ve gotten my key back without damage done to property,” she said in an email.

Kue says her claim that Jones had already vacated the flat is backed up by Jones’ social media posts about Guerneville and mortgage refinance documents signed in March 2021 in which Jones committed to occupy the Guerneville house as his “principal residence” for at least one year .

Jones said the refi document’s intent was to ensure that he would not rent the Guerneville house to others or list it on Airbnb. He said he has satisfied those conditions while maintaining his residence in the Castro, where he votes, pays utilities and keeps his furniture and possessions. He recently started moving out some items of archival importance to gay history because he feared they could be damaged by construction work Kue is having done upstairs.

Sonoma County property tax records reviewed by The Chronicle show that Jones has never claimed a homeowners exemption on the Guerneville property.

Jones said that he’s among many San Franciscans who cannot afford to purchase in the city, so he turned to a less-expensive area to accumulate some housing security and build some equity. He bought the house in 2018 for $500,000, per public records. He said a little bit of money he made from his memoir, When We Rise: My Life in the Movement, enabled him to do so.

Jones’ situation became a cause celebre, attracting more than 200 supporters, including many well-known politicians, to a rally in his support late last month at Harvey Milk Plaza.

As an organizer with Unite Here Local 2, Jones said he now has additional empathy for the members of the hotel and restaurant workers’ union, who are largely women of color and immigrants, if they were to experience the catastrophe of eviction.

“The only real thing that’s important about my story is not me, it’s not even her (Kue), it’s the reality that with all my unearned advantages of race, gender, the fact that I am politically connected and I do have access to good legal advice, none of that is sufficient to protect me” from the prospect of eviction, Jones said.

As pandemic protections expire, “we’re going to see a small tsunami of evictions coming up,” he said. “Most of those people do not have the resources or support that I have.”

Carolyn Said is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: csaid@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @csaid

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Lateefah Simon vacated her seat on the BART Board of Directors Wednesday after the agency determined she no longer resides in the district she represents — despite assurances she says she received from BART officials that her move kept her within district boundaries.

Simon presided over the BART Board of Directors during the height of the pandemic and represented BART’s District 7 that includes BART’s Richmond stations, Berkeley’s Ashby station and a portion of North Oakland’s MacArthur station. Simon told The Chronicle in a phone interview Thursday morning that she consulted with senior BART officials before moving last year from her Richmond home to an apartment complex adjacent to the MacArthur BART station.

A BART spokesperson said Thursday that the agency couldn’t confirm whether an agency official had given Simon that reassurance nor could the agency find any written evidence supporting Simon’s claim.

At the time, Simon was receiving death threats and other harassing messages — some of them laced with racist and misogynistic slurs — including an incident in which she found urine on her doorstep in North Richmond.

Simon planned to join Thursday’s Board of Directors meeting remotely before receiving news from BART officials within the last week that her home was “a stone’s throw” outside her district line. Her departure was briefly acknowledged at the beginning of Thursday’s meeting.

“I’m devastated,” Simon said in a phone call from Selma, Ala., where she is commemorating the 57th anniversary of the Bloody Sunday civil rights march.

In a later statement, Simon said, “Before moving, I informed top BART officials and sought their input, and was assured that the building is within District 7. I would not have moved my family otherwise.”

Before moving, Simon said she had numerous conversations with senior BART officials who helped her execute a conflict of interest memo, since her home is part of a transit-oriented development on the agency’s land.

Legally blind, Simon said she opted to move into an apartment complex across the street from MacArthur station because, “as a visually impaired person, to be able to walk across the street and access transit — it’s the best thing in the world.”

Simon shared representation of MacArthur station with board Director Robert Raburn, according to a map of BART’s district boundaries. Simon’s district included the station, itself, while Raburn’s district covers the portion east of northbound State Route 24 that includes the station’s entrance plaza, parking garage and apartments built on BART property.

Alicia Trost, BART’s chief communications officer, said that the agency last week asked Simon to give her address after “it came to our attention that there was a residency discrepancy.” The address Simon gave, which is across the street from the State Route 24 boundary, made it clear she no longer resided in the district she represented, Trost said.

Trost said the agency can’t confirm whether a conversation between BART officials and Simon about the move took place because the BART employee believed to have been involved is on leave.

The threats that prompted Simon’s move appeared to be linked to work she had done on police reform. She has been outspoken calling for a new investigation into the 2009 deadly shooting of Oscar Grant at Fruitvale Station by a transit officer. Simon also successfully pushed for BART’s ambassador program, in which the agency deploys uniformed civilian officers to help with security and handle some duties traditionally assigned to sworn police.

Simon’s election in 2016 was viewed by some as a changing of the guard that steered the agency’s Board of Directors toward social issues and a more progressive bent. Her colleagues elected her board president in December 2019. Months later, the start of a pandemic spiraled the agency into a fight for survival after ridership plummeted by 94% in spring 2020.

Several board directors were stunned by the news of Simon’s departure. They credited her for helping steer BART during its most tumultuous period and lobbying for the financial assistance from the federal government that has largely sustained BART since the pandemic.

“It’s been through my leadership that hundreds of millions of dollars came to the district during COVID,” Simon said.

As a single mom who rides BART daily, several board directors said she brought the perspective of transit-dependent riders seldom represented on the BART board.

BART board President Rebecca Saltzman, who urged Simon to run in 2016, said “we are a better agency because of Lateefah’s contribution.”

“She was president during probably the hardest year in BART’s history when the pandemic hit. The way she brought our board and staff together, and management and labor unions, to weather the crisis and bring in a huge amount of federal funding, it was really incredible,” Saltzman said.

Board Director Janice Li described Simon’s departure as “a huge loss for the BART board,” noting that she is now the only person of color on the government body. During the pandemic, low-income people of color who don’t own cars have accounted for a growing share of BART’s ridership, according to a 2020 customer satisfaction survey.

“Lateefah always spoke up for low-income folks, people with disabilities, Black riders,” Li said. “To lose that voice is significant.”

District 7 voters will decide Simon’s permanent replacement in a forthcoming election. The Board of Directors has 60 days to appoint a replacement to fill the vacated seat in the interim.

Bevan Dufty, a BART board director representing a San Francisco district, said Thursday that Simon “sought the advice of a district official and was assured that her move kept her within District 7, which she so ably represents. This advice was wrong, and here we are today.” He hoped Simon would consider moving back within the district and apply to be appointed to the seat she vacated this week.

“People who have known and worked with Lateefah began to view BART differently because of her presence on this body,” Dufty said.

Rachel Swan and Ricardo Cano are San Francisco Chronicle staff writers. Email: rswan@sfchronicle.com, ricardo.cano@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @rachelswan, @ByRicardoCano

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