Sign this petition and let the University of California Regents hear your voice.

San Francisco is a beautiful city, surrounded by water and blessed with attractive pockets of open space.  It is distinguished from other cities by its habitable residential neighborhoods because extensive development with tall buildings is generally restricted to the City’s Financial District.

UCSF is proposing to completely alter the character of the entire City by erecting a 15-story, 300-foot-high skyscraper in the middle of one of these residential neighborhoods, Parnassus Heights.  It would be the tallest building west of Van Ness Avenue and will add the equivalent of the combined gross square footage of the Salesforce and Transamerica Buildings to UCSF’s Parnassus campus. The planned expansion is projected to add 8,000 daily visitors to the area. It will affect all parts of the city, especially the adjacent neighborhoods of Cole Valley and the Inner Sunset as well as the Mt. Sutro Forest which abuts the Parnassus campus and is the single largest urban forest in San Francisco. This significant increase is not only destructive, it is unnecessary in light of the Regent-approved 2014 Long Range Development Plan that was intended to guide Parnassus development through 2035 and was fully supported by the community.  

The sponsors of this petition and many others, including former Mayors Willie Brown and Art Agnos, do not intend to stop UCSF from refurbishing its two existing hospitals at Parnassus or even from building a new one there, albeit one sized appropriately to the surroundings. Rather they believe that San Francisco as a whole would realize greater benefit by reducing the size of the proposed new hospital at Parnassus and locating new expansion to other parts of the City which are currently underserved and where the benefits of new medical facilities, housing, and jobs would be more valuable.  Bayview/Hunters Point is one obvious example. Other alternatives also exist including UCSF’s hospital at Mt. Zion which was reopened to treat Covid patients during the pandemic and the existing 2014 Long Range Development Plan. 

 You can immediately help by doing two things:

1. Sign this petition which will be sent to the California Regents, UCSF Chancellor Sam Hawgood, the UCSF Foundation, the Helen Diller Family Foundation, San Francisco Supervisors, San Francisco’s Mayor, and San Francisco’s State Assembly and Senate Representatives 
2. Forward this petition to your friends and social media contacts and encourage them to sign. 

Former San Francisco Mayors Willie Brown and Art Agnos are among the first supporters to sign this petition. 

More details on the proposed construction:

• The massive increase in development flagrantly violates the limit on the size of the Parnassus Campus that the UC Regents and both houses of the California legislature agreed to years ago in order to prevent the negative impacts of further expansion on adjacent residential neighborhoods. The Regents have repeatedly reaffirmed this promise to the City, the public, the California legislature and the California Supreme Court in order to obtain support for UCSF expansion in other areas of the City.
• Increased traffic, increased housing shortages, loss of open space, noise in excess of City standards, toxic air emissions to neighbors, thousands of bird collisions each year and the replacement of an open, agreeable landscape by one dominated by a massive skyscraper will be the inevitable result if this development
• The proposed new building does not comply with San Francisco’s zoning laws or its Health Care Services Master Plan which is intended to ensure that long-range hospital plans fit with the City’s health care goals. UCSF claims the 900,000 sq. ft new hospital is necessary to accommodate the increasing demand for emergency medical needs and hospital beds. But the projections justifying the need for a huge hospital predate the pandemic and the reduction in San Francisco’s population as well as the increasing ease and effectiveness of collaboration over the internet.  Many medical professionals believe there is a growing post-Covid trend toward outpatient/virtual services, including telemedicine and “hospital at home” and predict this will have the effect of downsizing and decentralizing medical facilities. 

For more details visit www.pncsf.org.

BY THIS PETITION AND FOR THE REASONS STATED ABOVE, the signatories hereto respectfully urge the University of California Regents to disapprove UCSF’s Environmental Impact Report for the New Hospital, and each member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, the Mayor of San Francisco, Assemblyperson Philip Ting and Assemblyperson-elect Matt Haney to take all actions necessary and appropriate to ensure that UCSF modifies its expansion plans at Parnassus to (i) comply with the Regents’ 1976 Resolution limiting growth at Parnassus to 3.55 million gross square feet and (ii) adhere to the principles contained San Francisco’s  Health Care Master Plan.

Parnassus Neighborhood Coalition