3700 California Street Permits: 250 CPMC Campus Homes Filed

The paperwork landed Monday morning. At 8:50 a.m. on Sept. 28, 2026, San Francisco's Department of Building Inspection logged permit 202609288684, a new eight-story apartment building with 214 homes at 3700 California Street. Three minutes later came permit 202609288686, a second building with 36 more.

That is 250 homes filed for the old CPMC California campus, the hospital block at California and Maple that has sat mostly dark since Sutter Health moved inpatient care to its new Van Ness campus in 2019. It is the first construction filing for the housing plan San Francisco approved in 2025, and the clearest sign yet that the project is moving from entitlement to actual building.

What DBI received on Sept. 28

The two filings are labeled B1 and B2 and share the same basic description: a new eight-story-over-three-basement, residential mixed-use building of Type I-A construction. That is the concrete-and-steel construction class used for mid-rise buildings, not the wood-frame podium you see on most five-story projects.

The occupancy codes on both permits read R-2, S-1, A-3 and B. In plain terms that is apartments (R-2), a garage or storage level (S-1), assembly space such as a lobby lounge or amenity room (A-3), and a small amount of business space (B). Here is the filing side by side.

Read the cost column carefully. Both permits list the identical $93 million estimate, even though one building has six times as many homes as the other. The most likely reading is that the same project-level figure was entered on both applications, not that the two buildings each cost $93 million. DBI's estimated cost is also a fee-setting number, not a construction budget, and it tends to change during review.

Which block this is, exactly

The permits sit on Assessor Block 1016, the middle of the three campus blocks. Presidio Heights is the neighborhood of large pre-war houses running from the Presidio wall south toward California Street, and this block is its southern edge, where it meets Laurel Heights and the Laurel Village shopping strip a block or two east.

The filings attach to every lot on the block: 3700 and 3790 California Street, 3875 through 3891 Sacramento Street, and 406 and 420 Cherry Street, plus one parcel still marked "situs to be assigned." If you have walked past the hospital's California Street side, with the 1 California trolley wires overhead and the hospital's long, blank walls facing the street, you know the spot.

What is not in this filing matters too. The block east of Maple, where the 1939 Marshal Hale building will be preserved for the senior and memory-care program, has no new-construction permit in the city's data yet. Neither does the block west of Cherry toward Arguello.

From 273 homes to 530: how the plan grew

The campus has been approved twice, and the second approval nearly doubled it. In February 2020 the Planning Commission approved a TMG Partners plan for 273 homes, with 31 new buildings ranging from 35 to 80 feet, much of it large family-size units and single-family homes.

Prado Group then took the project over and filed an expanded plan in 2024. The version the city signed off on in 2025, as SF YIMBY reported in June 2025, totals 530 homes: 298 apartments, 158 independent senior living units and 74 memory-care units, on about 4.9 acres, with an 80-foot height cap. Handel Architects describes the senior block as 232 units anchored by the preserved Marshal Hale building.

I will say it plainly: the 2025 version is the better plan. A former hospital site a short walk from Laurel Village, on a trolley bus line, in one of the highest-scoring parts of the city, is exactly where San Francisco should be adding more homes, not fewer. Going from 273 to 530 on the same footprint is the kind of math the city's housing targets require.

The 2019 permits are being cleared out

The older plan left a paper trail, and it is being retired. On Dec. 24, 2019, the prior team filed a stack of one-building permits across the campus, each for a single house, a fourplex, or a small apartment building, which is how the 31-building plan had to be permitted.

In September 2026, eight of those new-construction permits switched to withdrawn in DBI's permit dataset: one for 420 Cherry Street on Sept. 4, and seven on the Marshal Hale block on Sept. 17, including six filed under 3773 Sacramento Street and one under 3698 California Street. Most of the other 2019 filings on the campus still show filed. Expect more of them to go as the new building permits replace them.

Eight stories and an 80-foot limit

The permits say eight stories, and the approval coverage says 80 feet. Those are not in conflict. SF YIMBY's April 2025 story on the environmental review described the tallest building in the plan as eight stories, alongside two seven-story buildings and a five-story one. Story counts and height limits measure different things, and eight floors of apartments can fit under an 80-foot line.

What the permits cannot tell you yet is the final massing. A filing at triage has not been through plan check, and drawings often change before a permit is issued. We could not reach Prado Group for comment before publication.

What 250 rentals mean for Presidio Heights and Laurel Heights buyers

The short answer: more neighbors, more foot traffic at Laurel Village, and very little effect on what single-family homes here sell for. The for-sale market around this site operates at a completely different price level from a new rental building.

On our San Francisco neighborhood rankings, Presidio Heights scores 4.2 out of 5 and ranks third of 92 neighborhoods, with a 4.4 amenities score. Its 12-month median sale price was about $8.03 million in August 2026, down from roughly $10 million in July. Jordan Park / Laurel Heights, the neighborhood just south and east of the campus, also scores 4.2, with a 4.6 safety score and a median of about $3.52 million in July 2026. The San Francisco citywide median was about $2.2 million in August 2026.

Those numbers deserve interpretation. Presidio Heights swings by a million dollars or more month to month because only a handful of homes trade, and one or two trophy sales, like the Benioff-linked mansion deal we covered in August, move the median on their own. That is not a market 250 apartments will touch.

What does change is who gets to live here. Right now the entry ticket to this part of the city is a $3.5 million house. A new rental building opens the same schools, the same Sacramento Street shops and the same Presidio access to people who will never buy at that price. When we compare neighborhoods, that is the part of the story we care about most.

The honest downside: construction on a full city block takes a long time. SF YIMBY's review coverage put full build-out at around 40 months across three phases. If you are buying on Maple, Cherry or the 3800 block of Sacramento, expect years of trucks, lane closures and noise, and budget your patience accordingly.

Next steps: plan check, a site permit, then excavation

The next milestone is plan check. A permit in triage has to be accepted for intake, routed through building, fire, planning and public works reviewers, and approved before DBI issues it. Issuance is what allows work to begin, and with three basement levels, excavation and shoring would come first.

Prado has run this sequence recently a few blocks east. At the former UCSF Laurel Heights campus at 3333 California Street, SF YIMBY reported first-phase building permits in February 2026 covering 152 homes, and Hoodline reported vertical construction there was expected to start in late 2026. If 3700 California follows a similar arc, the more telling date is not Monday's filing. It is the day these two permits flip from filed to issued. We will be watching the permit record for that.

Sources

• SF Department of Building Inspection, permit 202609288684 (DataSF)
• SF Department of Building Inspection, permit 202609288686 (DataSF)
• DataSF, Building Permits dataset
• DataSF, permits at 3773 Sacramento Street
• SF YIMBY, Project approved for redevelopment of California Pacific Medical Center (June 2025)
• SF YIMBY, Environmental review available for 3700 California Street (April 2025)
• SF YIMBY, Prado Group files updated plans for 3700 California Street (April 2024)
• Richmond Review/Sunset Beacon, Development project approved for CPMC property (April 2020)
• Handel Architects, Block C of 3700 California approved (May 2025)
• SF YIMBY, New building permits filed for first phase of 3333 California Street (February 2026)
• Hoodline, Presidio Highlands gets a date with the bulldozers (January 2026)
• San Francisco Chronicle, CPMC Van Ness hospital opens (2019)
• Houseberry, San Francisco neighborhood rankings
• Houseberry, Presidio Heights
• Houseberry, Jordan Park / Laurel Heights
• Houseberry, San Francisco city page