San Francisco – Following this week’s announcement of the largest single gift in UCSF’s 152-year history, a generous donation for a groundbreaking healthcare program, opponents of the proposed Golden State Warriors’ complex in Mission Bay warned that shoehorning an arena into this geographic area could sabotage the funding’s success.
On Monday, UCSF announced a $185 million gift from Wall Street financier Sanford “Sandy” Weill and his wife Joan to enhance UCSF’s neuroscience program and make way for a new, state-of-the-art neuroscience building in Mission Bay. The new building will house clinical space to treat patients with autism, schizophrenia, Alzheimer’s disease, migraines, sleep disorders and other conditions of the brain and nervous system.
The services housed within this research facility will contribute to groundbreaking advances in the mental health field as well as expanded research and treatment for patients with neurological diseases.
The Mission Bay Alliance, a coalition of residents, former UCSF faculty, physicians, donors and the working men and women of San Francisco, say the planned Weill Institute for Neurosciences is the latest and one of the most obvious reasons why squeezing a basketball arena into the neighborhood is a bad idea.
“A holistic approach to wellness relies on round-the-clock patient access for critical monitoring and evaluations, functional research and ongoing clinical care,” said Bruce Spaulding of the Mission Bay Alliance. “A sports arena directly across the street from a facility treating serious neurological conditions will significantly impact care for some of the most vulnerable patients, creating unnecessarily stressful conditions and putting a real limit on the potential of the research and treatment in this facility.”
The 18,000-seat basketball arena is proposed to sit directly across the street from the Weill Institute for Neurosciences. The sports and entertainment center is scheduled to host 225 events per year, including basketball games, conferences, rock concerts and more. A parking lot adjacent to the new neuroscience facility will be shared both by UCSF patients and possibly by event participants.
Robin Katsaros, a patient advocate, member of the Parkinson’s Action Network (PAN) Board of Directors and wife of a successfully-treated neuroscience patient at UCSF, said the impacts of the proposed arena will be devastating for patients receiving care at the new building.
“Patients with diseases, including Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, Huntington’s and others, suffer from a range of fluctuating symptoms that make it hard to move, deal with large, unruly crowds and manage multiple stimuli,” Katsaros said. “Not only do many of these patients have physical impairments that can make it difficult to walk, but they also have cognitive impairments that can cause extreme anxiety and dementia. I know first-hand how difficult it can be to arrive at an appointment with someone who has Parkinson’s, and I cannot imagine the additional burdens posed by special-event congestion.”
The Mission Bay Alliance has long been concerned about the disastrous implications of the proposed arena on the surrounding hospital and biotech community.
In September, the Alliance was joined by a coalition of world-renowned scientists from UCSF and the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, who said specifically that the proposed arena would be a “disaster” for the City’s growing biotech and life science hub and called for San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee to abandon the proposed plans for this in Mission Bay.
In a letter to Mayor Lee, the UCSF scientists said the arena would threaten “the entire future of UCSF as the center of a world-class academic/biotech/medical complex.”
“Our major fear is that the Mission Bay site will lose its appeal – not only for the new biomedical enterprises that the city would like to attract, but also for most of its current occupants,” according to the letter which was signed by more than 20 of UCSF’s leading scientists and researchers.
“The result could critically harm not only UCSF, but also the enormously promising, larger set of biomedical enterprises that currently promises to make San Francisco the envy of the world,” the letter said.
Anchored by UCSF’s new $1.6 billion hospital and research campus, Mission Bay has given rise to San Francisco’s flourishing life science and biotech industry, generating nearly $4 billion in economic activity, $1.4 billion in income and 21,000 jobs.
Both the future of Mission Bay’s success as an area for quality healthcare and medical discovery, and the enormous potential of the new Weill Institute for Neurosciences, would be severely limited by an adjacent entertainment complex.
