The newest filing at 1123 Sutter Street in Nob Hill lists an estimated cost of one dollar. It's a stormwater plan — one shard of a 303-unit, roughly $134 million residential tower rising 22 stories on the site of a demolished mortuary.

On the 1100 block of Sutter Street, the permit the city logged on August 4 asks you to believe a job worth exactly one dollar is underway. Permit 202605131219, an "additions alterations or repairs" filing still marked filed, carries an estimated cost of $1.00 and a one-line description: "stormwater plans for issued full permits 202411215452 & 202411215486."

Follow those two numbers and the dollar figure stops being the story. The parent permits are the story: a 22-story, mixed-use residential building going up at 1123 Sutter, on a lot the San Francisco Department of Building Inspection still lists as vacant.

Permit 202411215452 covers 201 market-rate units — a "22 story over 1 basement, type 1a, fully sprinklered mixed use residential," in the filing's words. It was issued at an estimated $80 million and has since been revised to $89,106,417. Its companion, 202411215486, covers the base, core, shell and 102 affordable units; issued at $40 million, now revised to $44,553,208. Together that is 303 apartments and roughly $133.7 million of construction, split across two pieces of paper because the market-rate and affordable halves are permitted separately.

The lot has a shorter memory than most of Nob Hill. Until recently, 1123 Sutter held a two-story mortuary; permit 202210144347 demolished it in 2022, and an over-the-counter permit in July 2025 cleared the remaining asbestos "to be demolished under" that job. Excavation and shoring followed at a revised $906,980. A temporary tower crane was permitted in December 2025 for "new construction high-rise building." An earlier 14-story proposal for the site was withdrawn in 2021; what replaced it is half again as tall.

The $1 filing is not an outlier — it's the house style for how a tower like this gets built. The same address has logged a run of nominal-cost permits, each one a subsystem breaking off from the parent job: fire sprinklers (permits 202601083488 and 202601083492, one for the market-rate units, one for the affordable), metal stairs, cold-formed metal framing, an emergency-responder radio system. Each lists an estimated cost of a single dollar. The real money was declared once, up front; everything after is administrative bookkeeping filed a dollar at a time. A July 17 permit for window-washing equipment names the levels it will service — 22, 21, and 7 — which is as close as the paperwork comes to admitting how tall the thing is.

It rises into a neighborhood under other pressures. In the last 90 days, 14 eviction notices were filed in Nob Hill, one of them on the 900 block of Sutter, a few doors from the tower; the neighborhood logged 601 requests to 311 in the past week alone. None of that is caused by 1123 Sutter, and the building's 102 affordable units are a real number, not a rounding error.

Walk past today and you won't see any of the permit numbers. You'll see the crane, the shell going up floor by floor, and — before long — a rig hanging off level 22 to wash the windows of a building that, on paper, keeps costing a dollar.