UCSF gets $500 million gift to help build new hospital by 2030

The UCSF Langley Porter Psychiatric Hospital will be torn down to make way for a new hospital funded by a $500 million gift from the Helen Diller Foundation. The UCSF Langley Porter Psychiatric Hospital will be torn down to make way for a new hospital funded by a $500 million gift from the Helen Diller Foundation. Photo: Michael Macor, The Chronicle Buy photo Photo: Michael Macor, The Chronicle Image 1 of / 1 Caption Close UCSF gets $500 million gift to help build new hospital by 2030 1 / 1 Back to Gallery

UCSF will use a $500 million donation from a longtime benefactor to build a new hospital at its medical campus in Parnassus Heights — the first new hospital construction on the site in 35 years.

The commitment from San Francisco’s Helen Diller Foundation, to be announced Thursday, brings the foundation’s total giving to UCSF to $1.15 billion. The Diller family now ranks among a handful of U.S. philanthropists who have given $1 billion or more to a single academic institution.

The new hospital, to be completed by 2030, will be built on the site of the current Langley Porter Psychiatric Hospital. That hospital will be demolished, and its outpatient services will relocate to a new UCSF location in the city’s Dogpatch neighborhood by 2020. Inpatient care will remain at Parnassus Heights.

The two main hospitals currently on the Parnassus campus, Moffitt and Long, were completed in 1955 and 1983, respectively. Long will remain a hospital. Moffitt will be decommissioned to comply with state seismic safety laws, which require acute care hospitals in California to be seismically retrofitted by 2030 or decommissioned. (Langley Porter, which was built in the 1940s, would not meet the 2030 seismic standards either.) Moffitt will be repurposed, but it is not yet clear whether it will house medical services or administrative offices, UCSF officials said.

The latest pledge from the Diller foundation is part of an aggressive $5 billion fundraising campaign announced by UCSF last year, the third major fundraising push in the institution’s 154-year history. The previous major campaign funded the completion of UCSF’s second campus in Mission Bay 15 years ago. Mission Bay’s three hospitals, which opened in 2015, are for cancer and children’s and women’s health, while Parnassus houses adult inpatient care, including neurology, transplants and cardiovascular care.

“This is a transformative gift,” said Peter Carroll, co-chair of the fundraising campaign and professor and chair of UCSF’s Department of Urology. “You’ll see those services expand and serve patients better.”

The medical buildings at the Parnassus campus, collectively, will be renamed the UCSF Helen Diller Medical Center at Parnassus Heights.

UCSF had already been planning a new hospital on the Parnassus campus, a project expected to cost $1.5 billion. The gift from the Diller foundation accelerates the timeline and means UCSF will not have to borrow or raise as much money from other sources to make it happen.

San Francisco is a major center for medical care, with at least nine hospitals, including UCSF, St. Mary’s, St. Luke’s, St. Francis, CPMC Pacific, Kaiser, Zuckerberg S.F. General, the VA Medical Center and Chinese Hospital, though UCSF is the only academic medical center directly affiliated with a leading research institution.

Last year, the foundation pledged $500 million to UCSF — the largest donation in campus history, and among the largest given to any U.S. public university — to recruit faculty and students and fund research.

In addition to the Diller family, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Anil Agarwal Foundation have each given $1 billion or more to higher education, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education, which tracks private gifts made to educational institutions since 1967.

Helen Diller and her husband, Sanford Diller, who founded Prometheus Real Estate Group, have given hundreds of millions of dollars to scientific research, Jewish causes, education and the arts. Their first major contribution to UCSF, $35 million in 2003, established the Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Care Center, a cancer research center at the institution’s Mission Bay campus. Helen Diller died in 2015. Sanford Diller died last week.

Catherine Ho is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer.

Email: cho@sfchronicle.com

Twitter: @Cat_Ho

Editor’s note: This story has been updated with the correct name for the Helen Diller Foundation.