If you live in Dogpatch, you already know the neighborhood is in one of those strange windows where every third block has a construction fence and every fourth has a ribbon cutting. The waterfront looks like it is about to be finished and about to be started at the same time. Both are true.
This post is the resident's sort. What is actually open on the Pier 70 side of the neighborhood right now, in August 2026. What is coming later this year or in 2027. And which of the announcements you have been seeing in your feed are still just renderings on a website.
The domes are the biggest change on the ground
The most visible new thing at Pier 70 is Elevation Sky Park, a 165,000-square-foot complex of three geodesic domes and a pyramid on land Brookfield Properties owns but has not yet built out. The complex features three geodesic domes of various sizes and a pyramid, holds a total of nearly 2,000 people, and is expected to operate for five years.
Two things worth understanding about it if you live nearby.
First, it is a placeholder. The multibillion-dollar effort to turn Pier 70 into a neighborhood of offices, homes, and parks has been largely stalled as onetime anchor tenant Google pulled out and the development environment cratered, and Brookfield installed the domes as an answer for what to do with the space in the meantime. A five-year operating window is not a coincidence. It is roughly the amount of time Brookfield needs before the site's larger buildout is expected to resume, if it does.
Second, it is a real venue, not just an installation. Elevation XR, a San Francisco company that organizes immersive art and music events, operates the site and previously ran Wisdome LA and built domes at Burning Man and other festivals. Expect concerts, laser shows, and the kind of programming that pulls crowds off Third Street on a Friday night. If you are one of the residents who moved to Dogpatch specifically because it was quiet at 10 p.m., that calculation has shifted.
Building 12 is doing the work the master plan has not
The other piece of Pier 70 that is genuinely open is Building 12, the restored former shipbuilding hall. One of the few areas of the Pier 70 development that has progressed is the restoration of Building 12, a former shipbuilding site that has been turned into a market hall for restaurants, artisans, and a padel and pickleball club.
The signal tenant to know about is Breadbelly. With the launch of Breadbelly B12 at historic Pier 70 in Dogpatch, the team is expanding into a new chapter, with a second storefront and production center that grows the pastry, bread, and events catering programs while creating space to train the next generation of food and beverage professionals. Breadbelly was one of the harder tables to get in the Richmond before this. The B12 space gives them room they never had on Clement.
Building 12 is also becoming the anchor for neighborhood events that used to happen in parking lots and side streets. The Dogpatch Arts and Business Association has partnered with Pier 70's Building 12 for community programming, and Building 12 pop-ups now include an art gallery, artisans, and special events.
ICA SF is coming back, but not the way it left
The ICA SF story is the piece that has been misreported around the neighborhood, so it is worth being precise.
ICA SF opened its 11,000-square-foot Dogpatch gallery at 901 Minnesota Street in October 2022, moved to the Financial District in October 2024, and a year later transitioned to a citywide nomadic model of pop-up exhibitions. The reason for the move is worth knowing if you followed the original opening: curators and visitors often noted that The Cube posed significant challenges, namely, the scale of the interior made it difficult to present artwork effectively.
For 2026, ICA SF is not back in Dogpatch yet. Its programming this year is happening at the Transamerica Pyramid and, pending Port approval, at Pier 24 on the north waterfront. In late spring 2026, ICA SF is planning a major joint exhibition at Pier 24 featuring Dominique Fung and Heidi Lau, guest curated by Kathy Huang, that will transform the former photography venue into an installation exploring diaspora, mythology, and material culture through newly commissioned works.
The Dogpatch return is a 2027 project, and it is a big one. In 2027, ICA SF will come home to Dogpatch to launch a public art initiative at Prequel Park within the Dogpatch Power Station, transforming the 300-foot smokestack — the skyline marker of San Francisco's southern waterfront — into a vertical gallery for purpose-built works of art, anchoring a new waterfront park on a 2.75-acre stretch of shoreline.
That smokestack is the tall one you can see from Illinois Street. Once "The Stack" opens, the view down 22nd from Third changes.
The construction clock behind all of it
Here is the piece the general-audience coverage keeps glossing over. The three big changes on this side of the neighborhood are not running on the same schedule, and if you live here it helps to hold them in the right order.
| Project | Status as of summer 2026 | Next milestone |
|---|---|---|
| Elevation Sky Park (Pier 70) | Opened early 2026 | Operates through roughly 2031 |
| Building 12 (Pier 70) | Open, tenants expanding | Ongoing pop-ups and new leases |
| Dogpatch Power Station | First 105-unit affordable building opened Oct 2025 | Prequel Park breaks ground in 2026 |
| ICA SF Dogpatch return | Not yet | 2027 opening of "The Stack" |
| Pier 70 master plan buildout | Stalled | No firm restart date |
The Power Station is the one to watch if you own a home nearby, because it is the project whose completed form will most reshape sight lines, foot traffic, and daily routing on the south end of the neighborhood. Power Station is an extension of the Dogpatch that will create thousands of new homes, honor the industrial past, reconnect the community with the waterfront, and feature UCSF's proton-laser therapy center; it opened its first new structure in October, a 105-unit permanently affordable residential building, five years after the project's unanimous approval as a 4.4 million-square-foot mixed-use neighborhood on a 29-acre former industrial site, with a plan calling for more than 2,600 homes, and construction begins in 2026 on Prequel Park, a new waterfront space that reconnects the City with a stretch of Bay that's been cut off from the public for more than 166 years.
Read the last clause of that carefully. The stretch of shoreline you have been walking past for years is about to be opened to the public for the first time in more than a century and a half.
"When ICA SF moved from Dogpatch to The Cube last October, something clicked. That time confirmed an evolving vision: art doesn't need a single permanent space to make a major impact." — Ali Gass, ICA SF director
That is worth holding next to the fact that ICA SF was established in 2022 in Dogpatch and launched with an exhibition of Jeffrey Gibson comprising a large-scale video installation and holes excavated in the gallery floor. The museum's original identity was built on this neighborhood. Its return will not be a warehouse gallery. It will be a smokestack visible from the freeway.
What this summer actually asks of a resident
A few practical notes, sorted for how a person who already lives here is likely to use them:
- If you have friends visiting in August or September, Building 12 is the easier introduction to the waterfront than trying to walk them through Pier 70's active construction perimeter. Breadbelly B12 for a morning, the market hall for lunch.
- Elevation Sky Park is worth one evening visit early, before the programming calendar fills. Ticketed events are the point of the venue, not the architecture.
- If you were counting on ICA SF's Dogpatch presence returning in 2026, adjust. The Pier 24 exhibition is across town and is the closest thing this year to the museum's original programming voice.
- Third Street parking on Elevation event nights will get worse before it gets better. The 22nd Street Caltrain station receives Baby Bullet express service in addition to regular service, and the T Third Street light rail line runs the main commercial artery, which is now the more reliable option for evenings.
- If you are thinking about your home's relationship to the Power Station site, the meaningful change is not the affordable building that already opened. It is Prequel Park breaking ground later this year. The construction stage will run before the amenity does.
The through line
The pattern that connects all of these updates is the same one that has defined Dogpatch for a decade. The neighborhood keeps announcing large permanent projects, and then filling the wait with temporary ones that end up being what people actually use. Building 12 houses an accessible mix of maker spaces and local artisan retail, and Pier 70's creative core is anchored by maker's studios, a public art program, and public spaces. Those were placeholder uses too, once.
For residents, the summer of 2026 is a rare window. The domes are new. Building 12 is still fillable, not yet fully leased. Prequel Park has not started digging. ICA SF is on the road. In two years all of this will look different, and the sight lines you take for granted from the waterfront will not exist in the same way.
Walk it now.
If you own a home in Dogpatch or nearby and want to understand how the Power Station and Pier 70 timelines are shaping values on your block, Aviva Kamler can walk you through the specifics. Request a Personalized Home Valuation to see how your home reads in this stretch of the market.
