After nearly a decade, a crumbling old hospital — the California Pacific Medical Center campus on California Street — is scheduled for the wrecking ball in the next 18 months, removing five blighted buildings and sparing one for a top-to-bottom renovation.
It’s a massive project, with more than 450 new homes spread across three city blocks. There have been delays, and with SF’s housing and construction markets still in the dumps, more delay would not be surprising.
But here’s a more immediate surprise: the response to the plan was a lovefest. This, in a town where replacing a window can trigger contentious hearings, and in an exclusive neighborhood where the median home sells for $8.3 million and almost no new construction ever happens.
At the Planning Commission’s approval hearing in May, neighbors, YIMBYs, and the Planning Commission itself — which is usually good for at least a couple naysayer votes against new market-rate housing — all wished the project to get underway as fast as possible.
“It’s had its time,” Commissioner Derek Braun said of the crumbling facility, which reaches a top height of 80 feet and is currently fenced off and plastered with security warnings.
One neighbor who gave his blessing at the hearing says it’s part of a much bigger puzzle of tens of thousands of new homes San Francisco must make room for in coming years.
“We have effectively become a gated country club,” said Matt Regan, a Presidio Heights resident and senior vice president at the pro-housing business group Bay Area Council. He called the CPMC redevelopment “the beginnings of a solution.”
San Francisco is in the midst of its most consequential housing battle in more than 50 years. A sweeping redesign of about half the city, especially neighborhoods that rarely see new construction, is on the table. The Board of Supervisors must approve it by the end of January or the city could face harsh state penalties, like loss of transit funding.
The Family Zoning Plan, as officials have dubbed it, would make room for taller apartment buildings, more homes, and big neighborhood changes. A preliminary hearing on June 16 brought a couple hours of public comment, mostly in opposition.
This citywide reaction from a coalition of homeowners, tenant advocates, and preservationists therefore made the CPMC project approval and praise all the more remarkable.
‘My children were born in that hospital’
The first hospital on this stretch of California Street, a few blocks south of the Presidio, dated back to 1887. The existing campus got its start in the late 1930s and most of the buildings date to the ‘60s. Generations of San Franciscans came to know it as Children’s Hospital. Sutter Health became the owner via a merger in the 1990s.
“Two of my three children were born in that hospital, but I’m not going to miss it. It’s a big ugly building,” declared Commissioner Sean McGarry during last month’s hearing.
The buildings are seismically unsound, so in 2019 Sutter Health pulled the plug on the long-serving locale when it consolidated CPMC facilities in a new building on Van Ness Avenue.
Developer TMG entered an agreement to buy the site in 2015 and planned 31 new buildings with hundreds of new homes. But delays pushed Sutter Health to sell the whole thing in 2022 for a reported $50 million to SF-based Prado Group.
Prado’s proposal made substantial changes, offering fewer buildings (19) and doubling the number of homes to 456. The biggest new addition is an assisted living facility, which will have a capacity for another 74 senior residents (not included in the unit count).
Last month, the Prado plan faced judgment day at the Planning Commission. Every speaker during public comment supported the project. Even the few criticisms — not enough parking, for example — were couched in sentiments that otherwise approved of the plan as a whole.
“We can’t wait,” said one Presidio Heights resident.
It’s rare for even a minor housing proposal in San Francisco to net universal praise; for one this size, which will add thousands of new residents to a sleepy neighborhood with mostly market-rate homes, it qualifies as surreal. The seven commissioners — four appointed by the mayor, three by the Board of Supervisors — exercise sweeping authority over what gets built in San Francisco.
Meetings can get stormy. Last week, commission vice president Kathrin Moore and the board’s two other appointees walked out to protest the mayor’s choice for a new planning director.
But the CPMC project united the commission’s factions. President Lydia So called it “culturally appropriate” and “a great happy ending.” Moore, who is often skeptical of new development, said, “I’m delighted to see [this] designed at higher density. Densification can occur without pushing us beyond what good architecture allows.”
McGarry, a carpenters union official, went even further: “This is a perfect example of what upzoning should look like throughout the city.” He’ll have the chance to follow up on that assessment soon enough.
‘Plenty of other sites’
If taken too literally, McGarry’s comment seems fanciful. It took a lot of time, work, and a confluence of unlikely elements to bring 3700 California to such broad acceptance. “The attractiveness is largely based on its special location in the neighborhood, […] a rare, large three block site due to its former use,” Prado group principal Dan Safier told The Frisc. “Neighbors have been looking forward to seeing the former defunct buildings demolished.”
Dan Sider, SF Planning’s chief of staff, says the CPMC site is “lowercase-u unique.” But he also notes that the western neighborhoods, a main focus of the city’s ambitious upzoning plan, have “big, underutilized, non-residential buildings. Don’t get me started on the ugly ones to which many would love to take a sledgehammer,” Sider said via email.
Prado has one of these sites just a few blocks away. It currently houses UCSF administration and was previously the Fireman’s Fund Insurance Company headquarters. It could one day include more than 700 new homes, but it’s going to need a special financing district.
Planning Department spokesperson Anne Yalon also noted there are “plenty of other half-acre sites along Geary [Boulevard in the Richmond District],” including a former Walgreens at 5298 Geary that’s now a block-long empty building.
Dying malls and large shopping centers, old big box stores in residential districts — those are maybe where the future lies.
Tom Radulovich, senior policy fellow, Livable City
During a group call last month, outgoing Planning Director Rich Hillis noted that the city has tried many times to spur more ambitious housing and mixed-use buildings along Geary, such as the Lucky Penny site at Masonic Avenue. Hillis hopes the upcoming redesign of the corridor’s height and density rules will do the trick.
Across the street is Muni’s aging Presidio Yard bus maintenance facility, which needs an overhaul. There are no current plans to add housing there, but the transit agency is talking openly about “joint development” projects. The first test is redevelopment of another old bus facility, the Potrero Yard, which is supposed to add hundreds of homes on top but has seen some cost estimates double over the years.
At the same intersection sits the City Center mall, an unpleasant concrete jumble that has none of the destination charm of Japantown or Stonestown. After years of fighting neighbors and unions, a Whole Foods finally filled one of the center’s empty spaces. There’s no housing plan for it, but SF Planning’s rezoning map says the site can accommodate buildings over 20 stories tall.
“Dying malls and large shopping centers, old big box stores in residential districts — those are maybe where the future lies,” says Tom Radulovich, senior policy fellow at the urbanism nonprofit Livable City. He cautions that developers are unlikely to formulate plans for any of those locales until the city approves the housing expansion plan. (The deadline is the end of next January.)
Empty or underused commercial spaces immediately evoke downtown, of course. “One could argue there are also big infill opportunities downtown,” says Radulovich. Officials have layered all kinds of incentives and deregulation to entice housing conversions but have gotten little traction. The Family Zoning Plan does not include most of SF’s downtown and eastern neighborhoods.
The real trick is whether the lovefest attitude of the neighborhood in Presidio Heights can be reproduced at any of those other locations. In San Francisco, even projects that should be an easy lay-up for public support — such as, say, turning the parking lot at Balboa Reservoir into hundreds of new homes — can run into well-organized opposition.
“Community appetite for housing and for change is frankly, a wildcard. I continue to see the unexpected, even after 25 years,” Sider says.
New housing rules along major corridors in coming months will mean developers need fewer special permissions, fewer hearings, and fewer lucky breaks to make big new projects happen. At the same time, the city wants to offer builders incentives to stick by “culturally appropriate” design standards — in other words, to build taller and denser but hew to a neighborhood’s visual context.
It’s an as-yet-untested combination of sticks and carrots. But if they work, more of San Francisco could look like the CPMC site down the line.
all market-rate housing to include senior living at market rate