UC San Diego Breaks Ground on Hillcrest Healthcare Campus Project

Construction has begun on an approximately 10-acre site on the Hillcrest Campus, located in San Diego, California. It marks the first phase of a multi-phase plan to redevelop the full medical campus, providing new facilities, new technology, increased capacity, expanded care offerings and other community services and amenities.

The first phase of redevelopment includes a 250,000-square-foot outpatient pavilion anticipated to open in 2025, which will house specialty clinical programs including oncology, neurosurgery and orthopedics, as well as ambulatory surgery operating rooms, gastroenterology procedure rooms, advanced imaging, infusion and radiation oncology.

This phase also includes an 1,850-space parking structure anticipated to open in at the end of 2023, which will allow for the demolition of the existing parking structures, consolidating patient and employee parking for improved patient and caregiver access and experience.

Community and campus access will be improved by creating a new road connection and patient-centric drop-off corridor. Widening sections of the roadways will accommodate multimodal and transit vehicles, including a new grade-separated bike lane coordinated with the proposed SANDAG Uptown Bikeway improvements.

As the existing hospital must continue to operate throughout construction, building a new hospital required a complete redevelopment of the campus through a thoughtfully sequenced phasing plan, outlined in the 2019 Hillcrest Campus Long Range Development Plan. The 2019 LRDP is the third comprehensive long-range plan for the physical development of the campus, following plans created in 1978 and 1995.

Over the next 15 years, construction on the $2.5-3-billion project will continue on the Hillcrest Campus in five major phases, during which the majority of the existing buildings, both temporary and permanent, will be demolished and replaced. These phases were created to reduce impact on the surrounding community while ensuring current, critical campus functions remain operational.

DPR Construction is the general contractor and CallisonRTKL is the architect.