Most people who stay in hospital buildings can’t wait to get well enough to go home. But if L.A. County officials have their way, in a few years, hundreds of Angelenos might be calling one of L.A.’s oldest and most iconic hospital buildings their home.

Last month, the county released a master plan for the reuse of the 31-acre Los Angeles County General Hospital campus in Boyle Heights, which first opened in 1934. It has largely been vacant since the new L.A. General Medical Center opened next door in 2008.

The master plan calls for a transformation of the campus into a “healthy village” that features affordable, workforce and mixed-income housing and extensive community-oriented retail space. There would also be wrap-around supportive services for the affordable housing residents, workforce development services, public parks and gathering spots and pathways for pedestrians and cyclists.

“As we move forward, we have an opportunity to breathe new life into this landmark by creating a community-centered campus that expands access to housing, wellness, economic opportunity, and open space while honoring the legacy of a place that has cared for generations of Angelenos,” said Hilda Solis, chair of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, whose district includes the general hospital campus in Boyle Heights. 

County officials estimate the total cost to range between $1 billion and $2 billion, spread out over several phases that are expected over the next 15 years.

This is not the only old Los Angeles hospital that is undergoing redevelopment. On the other side of downtown, just north of MacArthur Park, lies the St. Vincent Medical Center campus, which opened in 1927. It shuttered in 2020 just as the Covid-19 pandemic began, and it’s now being transformed into a behavioral health treatment center hospital surrounded by permanent supportive housing. The first housing project is slated to open later this month.

Master plan for General Hospital

Centennial Partners is leading the master plan effort for the General Hospital campus. Centennial Partners is a joint venture between Culver City-based Primestor Development Inc. and Bayspring Real Estate Partners, which has headquarters offices in Redondo Beach and San Francisco. Centennial Partners’ project director, Giovanna Araujo, said in an interview that precise uses for the 31-acre site have not been set out yet to maintain flexibility.

“We want each of the phases when they come forward to be able to adapt to market conditions and community wishes at the time,” Araujo said. “So, we’re not being overly prescriptive at this early stage.”

At the turn of the century, there was an effort to have the campus serve as the western focal point for a major biomedical corridor that would stretch east about 4 miles to the California State University Los Angeles campus. However, Araujo said that concept was largely set aside in response to community wishes for housing and services.

“It was decided that it was not best to have only a single use on the site, but a range of uses,” she said. Before any of this can begin, the project environmental impact report still must be approved. It’s scheduled to go to the county Board of Supervisors this fall.

Plan’s central core

At the center of the plan is the 1.2-million-square-foot, 19-story Art Deco landmark General Hospital building that served millions of Angelenos both as the county’s general hospital since its 1934 opening and in its later years as County-USC Medical Center. The building was severely damaged during the 1994 Northridge Earthquake and was mostly abandoned after the opening of the L.A. General Medical Center facility.

The hospital building is slated for adaptive reuse with ground floor retail and hundreds of residences on the upper floors. Assuming this is successful, it would be one of the largest single-building adaptive reuse projects to date in Los Angeles. According to Araujo, portions of the ground floor will be reconfigured to better accommodate the retail businesses and pedestrians.

“We will carve out portions of the building to give more of an open space feeling,” she said. This will likely include removing some interior walls.

But the iconic façade and significant portions of the building must remain untouched as the building is now a state historic landmark and is being put forward for national historical landmark designation.

The lower floors above the ground floor could include some medical office space and/or space for wrap-around social services. The upper floors would be primarily devoted to mixed-income housing. The number of units has not yet been specified. The master plan document gives a range of 1,600 to 3,200 housing units for the entire 31-acre campus.

Before any of the repurposing work on the General Hospital building can begin, extensive seismic retrofit work must be completed. The county could have chosen to do that work immediately after the Northridge earthquake but opted instead to build the new hospital facility on the parcel next door. Now, the county has set aside $120 million to prepare the hospital building and the surrounding campus for redevelopment, including the seismic retrofitting. Whether that amount will be enough remains to be seen.

“The older the building, the more seismic work is needed,” said Michael Bohn, director of design and partner at Long Beach-based architecture firm Studio One Eleven, which specializes in adaptive reuse.

Campus redevelopment

The master plan calls for the now mostly empty campus grounds to be converted into a mix of community-focused retail space, office space, dining and gathering plazas, parks, and pedestrian and bike paths. The office space could include nonprofits that offer wrap-around services that are tied to residents of affordable housing units.

The plan document lists broad ranges for some of these uses for the entire campus including the hospital building: 240,000 to 320,000 square feet of retail, 200,000 to 400,000 square feet for office space and a similar amount for community/cultural space and 40,000 to 200,000 square feet of clean tech/advanced industrial. By far the biggest space would be for parking structures: 1.7 million to 3 million square feet. The parking structure space poses one of the most significant challenges to the successful redevelopment of the campus.

“One of the big goals here is to make this campus community-oriented,” said David McCullough, principal with San Diego-based McCullough Landscape Architecture Inc.

“Those parking structures – and for that matter the outer façade of the hospital building itself – present fortress-like structures to the community,” McCullough said. “Future development should be aimed at making the campus more porous and accessible to the community.”

St. Vincent Medical Center plan

Near MacArthur Park, activity is slated to return to the nearly century-old St. Vincent Medical Center campus that was shuttered in 2020. The hospital ceased operations in January of that year, but a few months later, the state opened a surge hospital to handle an expected crush of Covid-19 patients. That didn’t materialize and the hospital shut down for good that summer.

By then, billionaire biomedical magnate, philanthropist and Los Angeles Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong had purchased the 8-acre site for $135 million. His stated intention was to turn the hospital into a Covid-19 research center. But that didn’t happen. Soon-Shiong then hired commercial real estate brokerage Jones Lang LaSalle Inc. to reposition and eventually lease the site to biomedical companies. That didn’t happen either.

The site then became tangled in competing desires for its reuse: some pushed for affordable housing, others for behavioral health facilities. The plan that ultimately emerged was a combination of both. Soon-Shiong then sold the site late last year to developer Shay Yadin, who is principal of Beverly Hills-based Brenner Capital.

The sale price was reported in the Los Angeles Times as $66.5 million. That price translated into a nearly $70 million loss for Soon-Shiong (not adjusted for inflation).

Yadin’s redevelopment plan, which he has estimated in media interviews at about $300 million, would turn the hospital building into a behavioral health treatment facility.

The building would be surrounded by other social wrap-around services and housing for the homeless and others in need of behavioral health treatment. In March, the state announced the campus would receive $136 million toward the effort.