UCSF R&D Center to Anchor Power Station Redo
Facility to be built at waterfront site of former Potrero Power Station.
The redevelopment of the former Potrero Power Station will be anchored by a 285K SF research and outpatient cancer treatment center to be built by the University of California, San Francisco.
The UCSF facility will sit on block 2 of the 21-acre waterfront site in the neighborhood known as Dogpatch, according to plans approved this week by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, the San Francisco Business Times reported.
UCSF’s Mission Bay Campus and the UCSF medical center complex are a few blocks northwest of the power plant site, which is in proximity of Pier 70.
The Power Station redevelopment, which was approved in 2020 and will be built in phases by San Francisco-based Associate Capital, envisions 2,600 housing units, 1.6M SF of commercial space and a 250-room hotel.
The project will open a large portion of the city’s Central Waterfront that has been occupied by the power station since 1889. A 300-foot tall boiler stack still stands at the waterfront site, which was PG&E’s last operating fossil fuel power plant in San Francisco before it closed in 2011.
The 300-foot-tall chimney and several historic buildings from the power plant will be preserved as part of the massive redevelopment, which will include a new waterfront park.
Associate Capital last year started construction on the Sophie Maxwell Building, a 105-unit low-income housing complex that will be the first structure to open at the power station redevelopment.
A new seawall has been built around the power station site, where demolition and grading were undertaken in 2021. A series are new roads are being built, with an estimated $200M in financing from an Enhanced Infrastructure Financing District (EIFD) that was created at the power station by the Board of Supervisors.
The EIFD is a targeted form of public financing in the form of tax increments generated from the growth in property taxes collected from within the designated district boundary.
Herzog & de Meuron, an international architecture firm based in Switzerland, is designing several buildings slated for the power station redevelopment.
UCSF’s decision 25 years ago to put its hospital and research campus on former railyards at Mission Bay transformed that neighborhood into a tech center.