Rehabilitation of abandoned hospital into luxury building helping to push park towards self-sufficiency
(SAN FRANCISCO) Renters here will soon have an unusual housing option: a 154-unit luxury apartment building inside a national park.
For the last 30 years, the property was an abandoned hospital covered in graffiti, where trespassers caroused in operating rooms and shot photos of empty drawers in the morgue.
The rehabilitation of the 78-year-old building, once the Public Health Service Hospital, is the biggest renovation project undertaken so far by the Presidio Trust, the government agency established in 1996 to oversee the Presidio, the former military base in San Francisco that is now a 1,500-acre (607 hectares) national park.
But unlike most parks, the Presidio has about 800 buildings, more than half of them listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
Preserving and maintaining those old military barracks, officers' quarters, stables and other structures has been an expensive challenge.
Even more daunting is that the Presidio's Congressional financing runs out at the end of 2012, when the trust is expected to be financially self-sustaining, relying on income from the commercial and residential tenants that have gradually occupied the Presidio's renovated office buildings and homes.
'We're headed toward self-sufficiency in a couple years - and we'll make it,' said Craig Middleton, executive director of the Presidio Trust. 'In fiscal year '09, we made US$70 million in revenue, and 95 per cent of that was rental income.'
The Presidio's annual operating budget is about US$56 million, which is spent on maintaining the buildings and landscaping, utilities, roads, public safety services and other administrative costs. That rental income ranges from the US$9 million a year paid by Lucasfilm for the Letterman Digital Arts Center, a 23-acre campus on the site of the Letterman Hospital, to the US$1,700 a month that renters pay for modest apartments on the base.
In early April, a six-bedroom former officer's home with San Francisco Bay views was available to rent for US$9,580 a month.
While the trust has handled many renovation projects on its own, it joined with Forest City Enterprises on the Public Health Service Hospital redevelopment, which will open this summer as the Presidio Landmark apartments.
The six-storey apartment complex, on the southern edge of the park, will offer one- and two-bedroom apartments and all the amenities of modern living, including a doorman, stainless steel appliances, granite countertops, a fitness centre, a wine storage room and a communal lounge.
Renters will have easy access to the park's miles of hiking and biking trails, bucolic views - some looking out to the Pacific Ocean - and a green buffer from city noise. They will also have one of the most coveted perks of any urban setting: a parking spot.
But the level of detail involved in designing that parking lot illustrates the challenges faced by developers working on a project inside a national park.
'You have to think about how the parking lot is designed so there's minimal headlight spillover,' Alexa Arena, a vice-president of Forest City, said as she gave a tour of the site last month.
Saucer-shaped hoods above the lamp posts minimise the light shed on the park at night, while berms around the terraced lot keep headlight glare from spreading far and wide. Other rules restricted demolition projects during raptor nesting season and mandated that native plants be used for landscaping.
The former hospital's historic designation presented additional renovation hurdles. The original width of the hallways had to be maintained, Ms Arena said, and painted indentations appear along halls to show the places where doors were removed. In some cases, exposed brick had to be covered with drywall, since the modern appeal of brick interiors was not in keeping with 1930s standards - though remnants of the graffiti still visible on some walls represented another history that would be covered up.
Forest City removed two wings added to the hospital in the 1950s, which was partly a concession to community concerns about the developer's original proposal to create 350 apartments. The building is in an area of the Presidio that had mostly been abandoned for decades, so although the hospital was widely considered an eyesore, some neighbours were worried about the additional traffic a large apartment complex would bring to the area.
But the smaller scale of the project may turn out to be an advantage as the economy struggles to recover. Although rental prices have not yet been announced, Kevin Ratner, president of Forest City Residential West, said that he did not think it would be a problem to find tenants because of the building's setting.
Mr Middleton said that the overall occupancy rate in the Presidio was 97 per cent for the park's residential units, which are predominantly larger apartments originally built for military families. About 3,000 people currently live in the Presidio, with preference given to employees of organisations that have offices in the park. Between 12 per cent and 19 per cent of the apartments are priced based on the tenants' income level, Mr Middleton said, although the Presidio Landmark units will be market-rate rentals.
According to RealFacts, a research firm that surveys buildings with 50 or more apartments, the average asking rent in San Francisco was US$2,219 in the first quarter of this year, down 4.5 per cent from the same quarter last year. The occupancy rate was 92.4 per cent, down 3.5 per cent compared with the first quarter of 2009.
Still, compared with other parts of the country, San Francisco's rental rates have held up well.
'Because it's a blue-chip market, it hasn't depreciated as much as many other markets,' said Sarah Bridge, the owner of RealFacts.
The soft economy has had more of an effect on the Presidio's commercial space, according to the trust's latest annual report, with newly renovated offices taking longer to fill. Yet, the roster of tenants that have moved to the Presidio represents a mix of non-profit groups, arts organisations, athletic facilities, schools and commercial enterprises, creating a diverse and growing community within the park. -- NYT
Source: Business Times, 13 May 2010
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