The great Van Ness Avenue land rush began five years ago when Sutter Health broke ground on its new San Francisco hospital. Developers bet that the $2 billion building would fuel a multitude of new medical offices and glassy apartment buildings.

One developer bought the old KRON-TV building at 1001 Van Ness and proposed 256 condos. A property owner submitted an application to construct an apartment tower in the parking lot behind the Opal Motel, directly across the street from the hospital. A builder proposed housing and offices nearby above the long-closed Circuit City, while still another gobbled up the McDonald’s at 600 Van Ness with a plan to build 150 apartments.

The hospital — California Pacific Medical Center — is open now, but with the exception of a medical office building, none of the other developments has been built. Instead, Van Ness seems to be going in the opposite direction, with blocks of empty retail spaces and buildings with plans in limbo.

The AMC 14 movie theater at 1000 Van Ness closed last month; the Circuit City, which until recently served as the hospital’s construction office, is uninhabited, as is the former Concordia-Argonaut Club, which the Academy of Art University owns, across from the hospital. The CVS pharmacy at Sutter and Van Ness is slated to close at the end of March.

The only new development is the 250,000-square foot Pacific Medical Building across the street from the hospital at 1100 Van Ness. Sutter Health is the main tenant, leasing 78 percent of the space in the building, which was developed in conjunction with the hospital.

Neighbors attribute the lack of progress to several factors: planning delays, the tightening of capital markets, soaring construction costs, and the hassles and traffic gridlock stemming from the $316 million bus rapid transit line under construction along Van Ness, which is running 18 months late.

Marlayne Morgan, of the Cathedral Hill Neighborhood Association, said residents’ groups have supported several of the proposed developments, and it’s been frustrating to see them stalled.

“It’s very disappointing when well-designed and community-supported housing projects get stuck in the planning process and then don’t get built,” she said. “It’s gotten to the point where if you don’t have a shovel in the ground, it’s not going to happen.”

For Morgan, the condo project on the site of the former KRON-TV building is Exhibit A. The television station moved out of the building in 2014 when developer Oryx Partners purchased it and proposed a $93.6 million, 14-story tower.

That project was approved in late 2016 as construction costs were escalating more than 10 percent a year and lenders were tightening their criteria for loans. While Oryx Partners principal J.C. Wallace had hoped to open the building in 2018 — in time to sell units to the hospital workers — the process stalled before construction crews could even knock down the existing structure.

“The previous project did not pencil due to cost escalation, which led Oryx to consider alternatives,” Wallace said.

Oryx has shifted gears and is working with Altria, a developer of senior housing, to get city approvals for an assisted-living complex with 247 units. Cathedral Hill is already home to the city’s two largest assisted-living facilities, and the opening of the hospital is likely to create demand for more upscale senior housing, which can be very lucrative.

“The general size of the previously approved project is a good fit for the operating model for senior assisted living, which is very much in demand and under-built in San Francisco,” Wallace said.

Meanwhile, the hulking, four-story concrete structure means a “spooky, unsafe, and deserted street after dark,” said Morgan, who added that residents would have preferred condos but still support the assisted-living development.

“We are trying to make Van Ness a place people want to walk down rather than avoid,” she said.

Other projects have fared no better. The land at 600 Van Ness, the former McDonald’s, is being used as storage yard for construction equipment for the bus rapid transit line under construction. At 1200 Van Ness, home to a 24-Hour Fitness gym and the vacant Circuit City, the developer proposed 83 apartments, five floors of medical offices and 339 parking spaces. With both city planning staff and neighbors balking at the amount of parking, the developer, Van Ness Post Center, has put it on hold, according to a company representative.

At 1050 Van Ness, a proposed 130-unit tower on a parking lot behind the Opal Motel was “pulled back” because of construction costs, according to architect Michael Stanton, who submitted the application in 2014 on behalf of the property owner.

“We may be trying to bring it back again, but it’s not moving forward right now,” he said.

So far the biggest beneficiaries of the new hospital have been the owners of the Pacific Medical building across the street from the hospital. The office and retail spaces in the building have been going fast, brokers say.

Gary Ward of Blatteis Realty Co. said five of the building’s six ground-floor retail spaces have been leased or are close to being leased — future tenants include a major drugstore, a coffee shop and a language school.

“I think we have done well in what feels a bit like a wasteland,” Ward said.

The medical building benefits from being directly across the street from the hospital as well as from an underground passageway that connects it to the hospital.

The medical office spaces above have also done well. Demand for the space not leased by Sutter Health is strong, said Trask Leonard, president of Bayside Realty Partners, which built the center.

“Now that the hospital is open, we are seeing a big spike in interest,” Leonard said.

The desolate state of the rest of this stretch of Van Ness can be seen as a setback for city planners, who have been working for three decades to bring more of a mixed-use feel to the busy avenue.

In 1989, the city passed the Van Ness Avenue Area Plan, which rezoned the strip from commercial to “commercial-residential” and raised height limits to 80 feet along some parts of the road and 130 feet in others. The plan didn’t exactly fuel a boom, but over the following decades housing has popped up sporadically.

Between 2008 and 2014, six condo projects totaling about 500 units opened, and new buildings were built along Van Ness at Sutter Street and Clay Street. But since 2015 nothing has been built, with the exception of 35 units at 1868 Van Ness, at Washington Street, which opened in 2017.

Development to the east of the thoroughfare is moving more rapidly. The developer JS Sullivan is building 47 units at 1433 Bush St., while Eagle Pacific has completed 100 condos at 1545 Pine St. Another 37-unit condo project was completed last year at 1238 Sutter.

The smaller parcels on the more pedestrian-friendly side streets between Van Ness and Polk are more attractive to builders than the larger lots on traffic-choked Van Ness, according to Adam Mayer, an architect who lives in the neighborhood.

“Maybe developers are not building on Van Ness, but the hospital has spurred development one or two blocks to the east or west,” Mayer said. “It’s happening nearby.”

J.K. Dineen is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: jdineen@sfchronicle.com

Twitter: @sfjkdineen