This op-ed appeared in the Online version of the San Francisco Chronicle on September 21, 2020

UCSF’s Parnassus expansion plan would strangle neighborhood

UC San Francisco has a well-deserved reputation of excellence in research, teaching and health care delivery. That’s the “medical” side; but the “developer” side is seeking to strangle the Parnassus Heights neighborhood by proposing an additional 2.4 million square feet of new development — the equivalent of the Salesforce Tower and Transamerica Pyramid buildings combined — to the existing campus.

UCSF aims to squeeze almost 8,000 more people onto campus, in addition to the 17,500 who already go there daily. All this despite promising for 45 years that it would never again expand its boundaries or facilities at this already overbuilt site.

In 1976, the UC Board of Regents signed an official resolution establishing a permanent limit on expansion of the UCSF Parnassus campus. UCSF has used this permanent limit to justify expansion elsewhere in the city, including the Mission Bay campus.

The most significant building of the plan is a 16-story hospital, which at nearly 300 feet tall will be the tallest building on the entire west side of San Francisco. It will cross current boundaries into public greenspace, reducing the historic Mount Sutro Open Space Reserve.

UC has excellent options without breaking its promises and altering the character of our city.

In 1989, I was asked by UCSF Chancellor Krevans for space in the newly emerging Mission Bay project. Instead, I offered 400 acres for a new campus in the Hunters Point Shipyard. My idea was rejected because the “faculty committee” said the shipyard was “too remote.”

Not today. The shipyard is convenient to UCSF’s Mission Bay campus. There are hundreds of acres available for development. The hospital and supporting buildings would increase economic development and workforce housing for the entire southeast area, while allowing the Parnassus campus to retain the facilities essential to its mission including the ER.

Other unstudied alternatives are Mount Zion and Mission Bay. In addition, UCSF’s current 2014 Long Range Development Plan, adopted only six years ago would modernize and update the campus, uphold the space ceiling, and have a much better environmental impact.

The draft environmental impact report for the project received many responses from civic groups and individuals pointing out serious consequences of the expansion plan:

• Enormous pressure on housing and tenant displacement requiring an estimated 4,000 more units of housing. UCSF has proposed adding 1,000, with only 134 in the near term;

• UCSF’s 2019 commitment to “advance health equity” by “increasing its capacity to train, lure, and promote” San Franciscans for new campus jobs has been ignored even though it would lessen transportation and housing impacts;

• Impacts on air quality that will not meet current state or federal standards and cannot be mitigated. This is especially ironic considering that UCSF is at the forefront of research and advocacy on the impact of poor air quality on health. The EIR also shows significant increase in cancer risk as the result of toxic emissions, with inadequate mitigation plans.

• The new hospital will cut into public open space, and substantially increase bird fatalities resulting from collisions with the new hospital. Public views from popular hiking trails and from Golden Gate Park will be obstructed.

• UCSF projects a daily population of about 25,000. The housing shortfall and lack of adequate public transportation options for that many people will force many more to commute by automobile, making quick access to the emergency rooms problematic.

UCSF’s plan for the expansion of its Parnassus campus is expensive, deeply flawed, and again violates its long-standing promises not to expand its Parnassus campus. Our city deserves the same kind of superb caring attention always provided by the medical side of UCSF.

Art Agnos is a former mayor of San Francisco.