Tag: space ceiling

UCSF Space Ceiling Raised by over 40%

On January 21, 2021, the UC Regents approved a significant revision of the earlier 2014 Plan for  UCSF’s Parnassus Campus- despite objections from San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors who asked for a delay so the Plan could be studied further.

According to a UCSF report, “On Jan. 21, the Regents certified the Environmental Impact Report for Comprehensive Parnassus Heights Plan (CPHP), which amends UCSF’s 2014 Long Range Development Plan to adjust the space ceiling limit, projected campus population, and the Mount Sutro Open Space Reserve boundary.”

(You can find the new Plan here (as a PDF):
UCSF-Comprehensive-Parnassus-Heights-Plan)

For us in the Forest Knolls neighborhood, the main impacts of the change will be from the higher Space Ceiling, and the accelerated destruction of Sutro Forest.

THE SPACE CEILING

The Space Ceiling was established in 1976 in response to neighbors’ anger at the impact of UCSF’s unrestrained growth on surrounding neighborhoods. There is more about that here. It has been expanded from 3.55 million square feet – which had been exceeded several times, with existing square footage in as of 2014 in the range of 3.84 million square feet. This Plan will raise the ceiling to 5.05 million square feet.

In the forest, tree felling started in 2019, and the pace appears to be accelerating.

An article in SF Weekly in October 2019 discussed this new Plan, noting that neighbors had concerns and those were not really taken into account.

Anyway, the Plan is going ahead despite any objections, since UCSF is in practice only answerable to the Regents.

UCSF’s Aldea Campus: More Building, Fewer Trees

UCSF has revealed its plans for Aldea Housing. Back in 2014 when we reported that UCSF was removing Aldea student housing from the “space ceiling” that limited its expansion in the Parnassus area, we weren’t told what was planned. Now it’s been described in the 2020 DEIR (See the whole document here: UCSF-CPHP-Draft-EIR (1) ) Sept 11, 2020 is the last day for comments.

The plan is to demolish the existing low-rise wood-shingled buildings, and replace them with tall ones. The first phase will be three 8-storey and one 5-storey building. Here’s their impression from the DEIR document.

One of our concerns is that they’ll remove even more trees to accommodate the new buildings and the construction space to build them. We can probably expect most of the forest lying between Forest Knolls and the Aldea Housing to be thinned to the point that it is merely a few trees standing around instead of something resembling a wood.

As it is, the picture is already obsolete – most of the trees between the Aldea and Clarendon Drive are gone, and most of the ones along Christopher will be removed or drastically thinned.