UCSF Buys New Mission Bay Home for Dentistry School

The University of California, San Francisco is growing in Mission Bay.

On Wednesday, UCSF closed a deal to buy two adjacent buildings in the waterfront neighborhood from Alexandria Real Estate Equities for a combined $767 million, the San Francisco Chronicle reported. The building at 409 Illinois Street is the former headquarters of drug manufacturer FibroGen, and 499 Illinois Street is already occupied by the university.

The $767 million sale price is one of the highest in the city in recent years, only outdone by Kilroy Realty Trust’s purchase of the 750,000-square-foot, four-building Exchange complex at 1800 Owens Street in 2021 for more than $1 billion. That deal marked the second-highest price for a single property in San Francisco history.

UCSF’s School of Dentistry will relocate to 409 Illinois Street from the university’s Parnassus Heights campus near Golden Gate Park once renovations at the building are completed. Work is expected to start next year and wrap in 2029.

UCSF plans to turn the approximately 280,000-square-foot 409 Illinois building into dental clinics and a 60,000-square-foot education center for students enrolled in the university’s dentistry, medicine, nursing, pharmacy and physical therapy programs.

The School of Dentistry is currently housed in an aging building at UCSF’s Parnassus Heights campus that’s in need of seismic retrofitting. “As it turned out, 409 Illinois was suddenly vacant, and using it would be two years faster and significantly more cost effective than building a brand new building,” Brian Newman, UCSF’s director of real estate, told the Chronicle.

UCSF leases about 90 percent of the 24,000-square-foot 499 Illinois Street building and will remain in that space.

Mission Bay has become a hotspot for tech and artificial intelligence firms in recent years. AI giant OpenAI leases nearly 1 million square feet in the burgeoning neighborhood. With other firms moving in, UCSF aimed to act fast to secure vacant space in Mission Bay.

“We’re not known for super quick transactions because we’re a large institution,” Newman said. “The reason we moved quickly here is because we knew there were other parties, specifically AI companies, that were touring the building with contractors and trying to negotiate a lease for the whole building,”

With the two-building acquisition, UCSF will add more than 300,000 square feet to its portfolio of 4.6 million square feet of space it owns in Mission Bay and the Dogpatch. — Chris Malone Méndez