As a boy growing up with seven other family members crammed into a small room with intermittent electricity and no running water in a Mumbai slum in India, Gurpreet Chandhoke said, he used to go outside to use a street lamp to study for school and read books, which he got from a library and consumed voraciously.
One paperback thriller made an indelible impression on Chandhoke, then an eighth grader — not for its intricate plot involving a kidnapping of a U.S. president, but for its electrifying description of the Golden Gate Bridge.
“I was like, it would be amazing to see the Golden Gate Bridge, you know, once in my life, right?” said Chandhoke, now a 48-year-old partner at Forge Development Partners, the San Francisco company pursuing the only office-to-residential conversion that is close to breaking ground in The City, where officials have been trying to encourage such projects.
Chandhoke must have been a lucky kid. An anonymous Austrian sponsor he never met paid for him to attend an all-boys Catholic grade school, where he skipped two grades, and then to attend the College of Engineering Pune Technological University in Pune, India.
The nuns and priests were strict and helped him develop rigorous discipline that has served him well, Chandhoke said, but they were loving and kind.
School, meanwhile, offered a refuge from his 200 square-foot home, where the chaos was exacerbated by his father’s struggles with alcohol and with providing for his family as a traveling automobile-parts salesman, Chandhoke said. Also in the apartment were his younger brother, an aunt, an uncle and two of his grandparents.
Chandhoke’s father was Punjabi, and in 1947 his family fled their home in Rawalpindi, a part of northwestern India that became part of Pakistan with the partition of British India. The family, which had been prosperous, lost everything, and Chandhoke said the trauma left its mark. Chandhoke said he and his father were able to have a good relationship in later years after the elder Chandhoke stopped drinking.
Before dawn, Chandhoke was up studying, and he participated readily in campus activities such as debate and acting in, writing and directing plays.
“I didn’t want to be in my small house,” Chandhoke said. “School is kind of where everything happened for me in my life, because my home situation was very bad.”
Gurpreet Chandhoke, Partner at Forge Development Partners, with a view of the Russ Building from his office window in San Francisco on Wednesday, Feb. 19, 2025.
Craig Lee/The Examiner
Chandhoke said his school taught him about computers, which became his passion after he saw a friend’s Commodore 64. He left home to go to college at 16, and for a time he was homeless, alternating between sleeping at a friend’s place and at an aunt’s home while studying electrical engineering.
Upon graduation, Chandhoke said, he won a grant from the J.N. Tata Endowment that enabled him to fly to the United States, where he got a full scholarship from the University of Minnesota. There, he got a double master’s degree in electrical and mechanical engineering focused on computer-chip design.
Chandhoke said that at age 22, he got his first job at a tech company in Chicago before moving to Petaluma in 1999 to work as a chip designer for a tech company just as the dot-com bubble was about to burst.
Chandhoke’s hot startup employer, which had raised large sums of money, subsequently imploded, he said, and he decided he wanted to understand how to value a company. So Chandhoke went to the prestigious Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and got an M.B.A. in finance and entrepreneurship.
Thus began a career in banking, first with UBS in New York City and then Deutsche Bank in San Francisco, which had an office at 101 California St. that afforded Chandhoke a view of the Golden Gate Bridge, the subject of his boyhood dreams.
When Chandhoke’s mother came to visit, they went to the iconic span together.
“I am still blown away by how beautiful and gorgeous it is,” he said.
In 2009, Chandhoke launched his own investment fund focused on restructuring corporate debt, which he ran for nearly a dozen years.
In 2023, Chandhoke said, he reconnected with Richard Hannum, an architect and the founding partner of Forge Development Partners, with whom Chandhoke had made a couple of investments. Chandhoke’s younger brother, a successful software engineer in India, was an enthusiastic real-estate investor, and Chandhoke wanted to get more active in that realm.
Hannum invited Chandhoke to join his quest to build middle-income housing in San Francisco, and Chandhoke joined the team at the start of 2024. He was charged, among other things, with rounding up financing for projects.
That has been a daunting task in recent years because of widespread reluctance among investors to commit to San Francisco, largely because of The City’s reputation — deserved or not — for poor street conditions and crime, Chandhoke said.
“This affects our ability to bring capital to The City, because when I call someone in New York and say, ‘Oh, we need you to look at the debt for our building,’ they’re like, ‘Don’t bother calling me,’” he said.
From left: Supervisor Matt Dorsey, then-Mayor London Breed, and CEO Richard Hannum of Forge Development Partners are seen in front of the Humboldt Bank building at 785 Market St.
Craig Lee/The Examiner
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The company said last year it had lined up the nearly $70 million in private financing it needed and that it was entering the construction-design phase. Actual construction is expected to start in the second quarter.
The building, a circa 1907 relic with an ornate dome atop a tower that rose following the destruction of the great earthquake the prior year, is a relatively ideal candidate for conversion because it is long and narrow, with plentiful windows and light, and is eligible for historic-building tax credits.
“We like to call it middle-income housing, workforce housing, attainable housing, right?” he said. “The units might be a little bit smaller, but there’s no compromise in terms of the way the buildings are made.”
Chandhoke said city initiatives aimed at promoting office-to-housing conversions in recent years helped make the development more attractive and will make it easier to do more projects in the future — but Forge would have been able to do the project without them.
The City is also expected to take advantage of a new state law authored by former San Francisco Assemblymember Phil Ting allowing the creation of a downtown-revitalization and economic-recovery financing district in which developers of conversion projects could qualify to get portions of their property taxes returned to them annually for 30 years.
Chandhoke remarried and commutes regularly these days from Coronado — near San Diego — to San Francisco for work and to see his two daughters, who live with their mother in the East Bay. Recently, he was camped in one of the units at 361 Turk St., which is larger than his family’s childhood home.
“It’s meant for people who are busy working the whole day,” he said.
Kevin Green sits on the bed inside his unit at 361 Turk St., a micro-unit development by Forge Development Partners, on Dec. 30, 2023.
Patrick Hoge/The Examiner
The 361 Turk St. building is 95% leased, while the one at 145 Leavenworth St. is more than 80% leased. Chandhoke said drug-related activity outside the latter property is problematic, and he is bothered when he sees women with children passing by and does not understand the openness of the illegal behavior.
“When I grew up in India, and it was a tough neighborhood, you would never find someone selling drugs on the street, because the police would come and arrest them,” he said. “And that part is very hard for me to come to terms with.”
Chandhoke said he’s hopeful that new Mayor Daniel Lurie’s administration will succeed in burnishing The City’s reputation, rents will rise and interest rates will drop, making it easier to get financing.
In a sign of a possible economic revival, Forge recently lost out with bids for two buildings it wanted to buy for office-to-residential conversions. The company has close to 1,200 units it hopes to deliver in the foreseeable future, and it might be close to a deal on two others, Chandhoke said.
One thing Chandhoke said he’s certain about is that San Francisco will rise again, just as it did after the dot-com collapse and the Great Recession. The artificial-intelligence boom underway in The City proves again that San Francisco has an extraordinary capacity for rebirth, he said.
“We feel like we are at the beginning of the launch of that slingshot right now, and things are going to turn now in real estate,” he said.
Chandhoke said hat on a trip not long ago to India — a country he still loves — he took a picture of the causeway outside his childhood home, where there were still three pit toilets shared by multiple apartments and two water-storage vessels. Chandhoke recalled how his family could only fill the drums from a pipe once a day during a single allotted time period.
He saw children out begging instead of being in school, some of whom he and his brother help with donations.
“The difference between America and India is that if you’re born poor in India, it’s a curse,” said Chandhoke, who said he’s grateful he landed in a place where hard work can change futures, people are willing to judge on merits and individuals are encouraged to think for themselves.
“This is the greatest country in the world, and this is the greatest city in America,” he said. “It’s still the same beautiful, amazing city that I wanted to see when I was in eighth grade.”
