We regret starting the year with sad news in this post from SutroForest.com. It is reprinted here with permission.

With the new revised plan for UCSF’s Parnassus Campus having been approved by the UCSF Regents – despite San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors asking for a delay so the Plan could be studied further – we expect the destruction of the forest to accelerate.

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)

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.

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.

The SaveSutro neighbors’ group battled for over twenty years to save the forest, which UCSF has sought to destroy for an ever-changing list of reasons since around 2001. Eventually, we were outwaited. (The picture below is the forest in 2006.)