Extreme Makeover, Hospital Edition: A win-win solution for nurses and neighbors
By Cheri Rae

A few years ago, when big-time condo development moved into the neighborhood, I joked that the financially struggling St. Francis Hospital was the perfect place to convert into condos. With its Mission Revival style, city and ocean views to die for, and its location within walking distance to downtown restaurants, shops and cultural amenities, it was just the spot.
Turns out my idea was neither as funny, original nor as crazy as my friends and I thought.
In recent years, closed-down hospitals from Oxnard to Australia have been spared from demolition and successfully converted into housing ranging from low-income apartments to luxury condominiums. Their previous incarnation as houses of healing has proved to be an attractive selling point.
It’s called “adaptive re-use,” and it’s created hip and extremely desirable condominiums from former hospitals in cities across America: Scripps Hospital in La Jolla; City Hospital in St. Louis; Columbia Hospital for Women in Washington, D.C.; Plunkett Hospital in Adams, Massachusetts, and many more.
Santa Barbara’s St. Francis Hospital seems the right place for this kind of condo conversion at exactly the right time.

Today, the Planning Commission will begin its consideration of the Draft Environmental Impact Report of the Cottage Hospital Foundation Workforce Housing Project proposed for St. Francis Hospital. The commissioners will hear that adaptive re-use is supported by the findings of the Draft EIR, which studied several alternatives to the proposed 115-unit project consisting of 81 affordable units intended for Cottage Hospital employees, and 34 market rate units. According to the document, the use of only existing buildings “would result in the development of approximately 89 residential units, which would achieve the basic objectives of the proposed project.” Further, it concludes, such adaptive re-use would “generally result in reduced short-term impacts” to the environment.
The concept of adaptive re-use for St. Francis Hospital is not new, and has been discussed at every one of the numerous public meetings about the project. Each time, a member of the Cottage development team has offered the questioner two stock answers: 1) the nurses for whom these condos are intended don’t want to live in a hospital when they work in one, and 2) it’s too expensive.
Let’s get out of town and take a look at how the questions have been answered differently in hospital-to-condo developments that have succeeded with adaptive re-use.

Consider the St. Louis example, where the 92-year-old City Hospital was reborn as the 102-unit Georgian Condominiums. Real estate agent Joan Openlander recently sold one unit to a doctor who was delighted to buy the space that once housed his office. “A lot of people are buying for the sentimental value,” Openlander observed. “And everyone is so happy to see somebody doing this [adaptive re-use] instead of tearing it down.”
Or consider the La Jolla example, where the old Scripps Hospital was transformed into an exclusive, upscale 41-unit condominium development overlooking the Pacific Ocean. “It feels like a country club,” noted real estate agent Peter Tover, “and there has been no resistance whatsoever to living in a former hospital.”
Score one for aesthetics. What about the cost?
According to Ted Bumgardner, a principal of Gafcon in San Diego, one of the nation’s leading construction management firms, there are tremendous benefits to wise adaptive re-use. “The financial viability generally is driven by the bones of the building. If it’s structurally sound, and the exterior envelope is intact, it’s almost always much less expensive than to start from the ground up.” He added, “In 30 years in this business, I have never seen construction costs rise as they have in the past 18 months. You can bet with the hurricane damage in the Gulf, prices will continue to rise, and you can save more and more by adaptive re-use.”
Score one for economics.
So the aesthetic and economic benefits of adaptive re-use are obvious--what about the environmental advantages? Consider that leaving this building in place would avoid the generation of 18,200 tons of waste, including concrete, asphalt, asbestos fibers, lead, mercury, and PCBs, and also avoid the serious health concerns related to carcinogenic diesel emissions from nearly 7,000 truck trips during 37 weeks of demolition and grading.
If the city of Santa Barbara could avoid wreaking havoc on the health and tranquility of its citizens by avoiding the demolition of St. Francis Hospital, yet still manage to accomplish the goal of creating housing on the site, wouldn’t it be wise to pursue that goal in earnest?
A couple of years ago, planning commissioners acted wisely when they required a condo developer to save three perfectly good bungalows on Laguna Street, rather than allowing their planned demolition. By requiring the adaptive re-use of St. Francis Hospital, the commissioners will encourage the creation of the kind of aesthetically pleasing, environmentally friendly and financially sound development that has been so successful in so many other communities generally thought to be far less progressive than Santa Barbara.