A very quiet lawsuit filed by B'game against SFO and its owner, the City of SF, for causing the ground to sink in North B'game and along the Bayfront has been settled in B'game's favor.  Back in February, the SF Chronicle reported

The entire Bay Area is plunging downward under the weight of its own sprawl. And that’s a concern as sea levels rise and cities try to figure out how they’ll stay above water in the coming decades. 

Tom Parsons, a geophysicist with the U.S. Geological Survey, documented the problem recently. He calculated the weight of every building in the Bay Area and found the total to be so great, about 3.5 trillion pounds or the equivalent of more than 7 million Boeing 747s, that it’s pushing the Earth’s surface down. His research shows the region has sunk as much as 3.1 inches, on average, as a result of a century’s worth of development.

“We’ve got all that fill on the bay that’s susceptible to being compressed, and we’re building on it, and we’re seeing some of the impacts of leaning buildings and subsidence,” Parsons told The Chronicle.

But the key fact that led to the quiet legal action is

Parsons did his research by tapping databases of Bay Area building sizes and figuring out the weight of the structures and their contents. As might be expected, weights were greatest in the downtown areas of San Francisco, Oakland and San Jose. Of nearly 1 million buildings evaluated, the heaviest was San Francisco International Airport.

The weight calculation did not consider roads, bridges and other infrastructure, so the total is assumed to be a significant underestimate.

The City has been worried about the impact of sea level rise on our Bayfront (noted here) and has expended substantial resources coming up with plans.  All of the additional building at SFO (the international terminal, the hotel and the new tower) is believed to have exacerbated the sinking–and made sea level rise more of a risk.  The settlement amount rumored to be in the neighborhood of $3.5 million will go towards reimbursing these expenses and further mitigation near our cash cow hotels.  Great work by the city staff getting SF to pay up!  Here is the map of building "subsidence".