[WildCowboy]

There will be a long review by the state, so construction won't start until probably 2010, maybe 2011. It has to open by December 2014 in order to meet seismic deadlines for UCSF's hospital buildings at Mount Zion to be shut down.

The full-service hospital will remain at Parnassus. That's where the main emergency room, ~500 hospital beds, specialized treatment like transplants, etc. will remain for decades to come. This Mission Bay project is intended to serve two primary purposes:

1. Move UCSF's renowned Children's Hospital from its current location in just a few floors of the Parnassus complex to a larger site that can be designed to be more appropriate for children and families. And since women's services are frequently closely tied into children's services, they're moving as well. These moves have the side benefit of freeing up space at Parnassus for a variety of uses.

2. Allow UCSF to shutdown all inpatient care at Mount Zion, where the buildings would require extensive retrofitting or rebuilding to meet seismic standards. That means that cancer, which is the focus of Mount Zion, needs to move.

Of course, it doesn't hurt that children and cancer are two easy ways to appeal to donors, which you have to do when you need to raise $500 million in private money (in addition to the $1 billion in other monies) just to do the project. Of course, it helps that Dede Wilsey is running that campaign.