Dave Eggers spotted Pier 29's vacant 100,000-square-foot warehouse while biking the Embarcadero in 2022. This fall it opens as Art + Water, a tuition-free atelier for 30 local artists — as Eggers's Mission District nonprofit navigates the loss of its AmeriCorps funding partnership.

On the Embarcadero in 2022, Dave Eggers was biking when he spotted an open garage door on a pier warehouse that nobody seemed to be using. The building was 100,000 square feet, mostly empty, and had stood since around 1915. By this fall, it's scheduled to open as Art + Water — the city's largest free studio program and perhaps its most deliberate answer to two decades of artists leaving San Francisco.

The building is Pier 29, a cargo warehouse damaged in a 2012 fire and rebuilt the following year for the America's Cup, then largely returned to parking. Eggers and Bay Area artist and educator JD Beltran have been developing the space through their nonprofit since that 2022 encounter. As reported in the SF Examiner in March — reprinting a New York Times piece by Melena Ryzik — the project is designed as a tuition-free atelier: 30 local artists receive free studio space for a year, with 10 established artists mentoring 20 emerging ones selected by application. Eggers described it to the Times as an attempt to address "a problem that everybody talks about endlessly here — the mass exodus of artists from San Francisco over the last 20 years."

The lease, arranged through Community Arts Stabilization Trust with the Port of San Francisco, runs roughly 10 cents per square foot — against a going rate of about $2 for comparable industrial space — in exchange for programming the Port has been trying to activate on its underused piers. The building's gabled, skylit roof and 33 giant windows give the floor plan a natural light that surface parking had been wasting. Planned alongside the studios: a major exhibition space (the inaugural show centers on filmmaker and musician Boots Riley, curated by co-director René de Guzman), free public programming, and a sprawling café under the direction of Yemeni coffee specialist Mokhtar Alkhanshali, who told SFist the vision would be "its own world." Full seven-figure funding has not yet been secured; Art + Water co-director Nicole Avril told the Examiner the organization has "verbal commitments."

The Pier 29 project arrives while Eggers's older institution on Valencia Street is navigating a harder stretch. According to 826 Valencia's own statement on federal funding cuts, the organization lost its AmeriCorps partnership — a program that had supported it for over a decade — requiring the replacement of more than $150,000, against a broader need the statement puts at $1 million for long-term sustainability. The Mission block around 826 Valencia Street is itself under pressure: DataSF records show 26 eviction notices filed in the Mission in the last 90 days and 2,703 service requests logged in the last week alone.

Eggers opened 826 Valencia at its namesake address in 2002 with educator Nínive Calegari — the one with the pirate supply store out front. The organization now runs three San Francisco locations and has seeded a national network of more than 70 similar writing centers reaching roughly 38,500 students a year.

Two addresses in 2026: a Mission storefront that has been operating for 24 years and is currently raising money to stay whole, and a waterfront pier warehouse that sat mostly unused for 11 years and is about to get 30 artists working through it. Someone biking the Embarcadero this fall will find one very much open, one filling up.