By Kevin V. Nguyen : sfstandard – excerpt
San Francisco is full of empty offices that residents and politicians keep saying need to be converted into housing, but most developers are not interested in pursuing such projects because of the high costs.
But in the exclusive Presidio Heights neighborhood, the back-to-back closures of two massive hospitals have opened the door for a different type of transformation—one where a local developer plans to turn medical campuses into over 1,300 new homes.
Both are located on California Street on either end of thriving Laurel Village—a business strip filled with ground-floor boutiques, small chains, fitness studios and beauty salons, among other small businesses. Historically, this is one of the city’s most built-out and tightly constrained neighborhoods.
One hospital is located at 3700 California St., which is the site of the former California Pacific Medical Center, recently home to Sutter Health before it decamped to Van Ness Avenue…(more)
Ever wonder why every piece of available property must be torn down and rebuilt to be converted into something it is not? As we understand it, there are plans to set up medical facilities for people who need to transition from using drugs on the street to living indoors. It seems like using the hospitals as medical facilities more or less as they are and turning some of the buildings into transitional housing within the shell would be the cheapest, and therefore our government avoids it. Somebody has to make money on every project or the government will not support it. How do we bring economic sanity to San Francisco?