UCSF rejects supes’ call to delay vote on expansion
The San Francisco Board of Supervisors on Tuesday asked the University of California Board of Regents to slow down its approval of a 2 millionsquarefoot expansion of UCSF’s Parnassus campus.
In a 101 vote the board requested that the regents delay its vote until March. The regents, the board that controls the UC system, is scheduled to consider approvals during its Jan. 19 through Jan. 21 meeting.
“We are asking for a reasonable, twomonth pause on a proposed plan to add 2 million gross square feet to the Parnassus campus, which will no doubt have citywide impacts for decades to come,” said Supervisor Dean Preston, who represents the area and authored the resolution.
Preston said the public needs more time “to understand the implications of this project and to make sure that the necessary community benefits — particularly commitments to affordable housing, transportation and labor — are included in the agreement.”
In a statement later Tuesday, UCSF rejected the request, saying that pushing back approvals would “only delay building the critical health care infrastructure San Francisco needs today.”
“In a year when the pandemic has revealed the vulnerability of health care and hospital capacity in San Francisco, we cannot afford to delay this important project any longer,” the university said in a statement to The Chronicle. “Every year, UCSF turns away up to 3,000 patients because of a lack of capacity. We must immediately begin the 10year process of replacing our aging and outdated hospital now to meet the state’s 2030 seismic deadline or create needless bureaucratic complexity and higher costs.”
UCSF said it had held 28 community meet
ings over two years, working with neighbors to “develop a 30year plan to modernize our campus that addresses our hospital’s current lack of capacity.”
As a state agency, UCSF does not require city approvals for land use or development decisions, but did spend several months negotiating a memorandum of understanding with Mayor London Breed’s office. As part of those negotiations the medical school and hospital agreed to increase the amount of housing in the plan from about 750 to 1,263 units and make about 40% of them available at below market rates. In addition, UCSF agreed to invest $20 million in transportation improvements.
While some critics of the project welcomed the changes, others continue to maintain that the project is out of scale with the neighborhood. Some opponents of the development said the housing should be sped up to be completed when the new hospital and research facility is done, rather than over the 30year span of the plan.
Preston argued that delaying approvals would “not impact the timeline for the project to be shovelready.”
“The negotiations are heading in the right direction, but are not there yet,” Preston said. “I hope the regents will heed our call for more time to get this right.”
A spokesman for Breed also said the requested delay was unwarranted.
“This is a good project that has gone through extensive community process over two years, and we don’t need to delay it any longer,” spokesman Jeff Cretan said. “The housing, transportation and workforce investments that are part of the package the mayor worked to secure for the city will be a significant benefit for the community.”