The 16-story building at 6th and Market — once WeWork, once the Burning Man Project's HQ — sold for $11 million in March 2025, down from $62 million in 2016. Its new operators are running it as a "vertical village" for frontier-tech founders. As of last spring, they were still short of the occupancy level needed just to break even.

The building at 995 Market Street — corner of 6th, 16 stories, 90,500 square feet, built in 1908 as the David Hewes Building — has cycled through several lives. WeWork was here. The Burning Man Project was here. The building sold for $62 million in 2016, went into mortgage default, came back at a $6.56 million foreclosure auction in April 2024, and was acquired in March 2025 by Deep Ink Ventures, a Berlin-based firm, for $11 million. That's an 82 percent drop from the 2016 price — a discount that reflects, in part, what the 6th-and-Market corridor went through in the intervening years.

Deep Ink's subsidiary, Berlinhouse Society, has been running the building since the acquisition as a "vertical village" for frontier-tech founders — AI, crypto, biotech, robotics, longevity. Floors are organized thematically: robotics on four, synthetic biology on eight (a community lab called BioPunk, run by founder Elliot Roth), longevity on eleven, led by VitaDAO co-creator Laurence Ion. Membership runs $190 a month or $1,800 a year, by application; private offices go for $700 to $2,800 a month. The building has hosted more than 50 events monthly, and a 36-hour conference called "Intelligence at the Frontier" drew more than 1,000 attendees. Vitalik Buterin has spoken there.

The problem is occupancy. SF Standard reported in May 2025 that the building was running at roughly 60 to 65 percent floor capacity — short of the 70 percent threshold the operators said they needed just to cover property taxes and operating costs. The SF Chronicle's new piece on the building, now circulating widely on r/bayarea, puts a headline on the gap: building communities is harder than building startups.

Co-founders Christian Nagel and Jakob Drzazga have positioned the project in explicitly ideological terms, drawing on the Network State framework associated with Balaji Srinivasan — branding 995 Market "civilization v2" and filtering membership by "vibe alignment." The block hasn't made that ideology easy to test. At a weekly town hall, Acting Captain Kevin Knoble of SFPD's Tenderloin Station briefed members on conditions at their front door. "The fentanyl crisis has primarily been down here," Knoble told them, per SF Standard. "It's a steep and hard path." The ground-floor CVS holds its lease on the building but is not actively operating.

South of Market logged 25 eviction notices in the last 90 days and 1,075 311 service requests in the past week — the texture of a neighborhood under sustained strain. Those numbers don't land on one building's doorstep specifically, but they sketch the block Deep Ink bought into. Nagel's framing — "there's a crisis here, but it's also the heart of innovation" — acknowledges the contradiction without resolving it.

The next planned step is a residential conversion: eight of the building's floors to co-living units in a five-bedroom cluster format, designed by a firm called Creates Cool, with city approval targeted for 2026. That application hasn't been filed yet. What's there now, standing outside on Market Street, is a shuttered CVS at ground level, a lobby that hosts a frontier-tech membership community, and 16 floors still working out whether the conference attendance and the signed leases can meet somewhere in the middle.