Long-shuttered St Vincent hospital to reopen next month as behavioral health campus

This story first appeared on The LA Local.

The long-shuttered St. Vincent Medical Center is set to reopen next month as part of a sprawling behavioral health and housing campus. 

The center, just a few blocks away from MacArthur Park is aimed at addressing homelessness, mental illness and addiction in the area. 

The first phase of the project, a 205-bed interim housing program for people struggling with mental illness and substance use disorders, is scheduled to open in June. The program will be housed at Seaton Hall on South Lake Street, according to developers.

The opening marks the first major milestone in an ambitious redevelopment effort that aims to transform the former St. Vincent campus into a centralized hub for social services.

“We try our best to do this on the streets,” said Victor Narro, project director at the UCLA Labor Center and a longtime organizer in the MacArthur Park area. “But it’s much easier when you have a physical location. This building may offer us an opportunity to provide services for the category of unhoused people who are chronically ill, who have suffered major mental health issues and also people who are really deeply addicted.”

“I think it’s something that’s been long overdue,” Narro added. 

Additional phases of the redevelopment are expected to open through 2027, with the full campus projected to be up and running before the 2028 Summer Olympic Games, developer Shay Yadin said. 

Yadin said the project is moving fast partly because developers are reusing the existing hospital campus rather than building entirely new facilities.

“We’re not adding a single square foot to this whole place,” Yadin said. “Everything we’re doing is internal renovation.”

The 7.7-acre property has a long history in LA. Founded in 1856 by the Daughters of Charity, St. Vincent is widely considered the city’s first hospital. But after years of financial struggles, the hospital’s previous owner declared bankruptcy and the facility closed in 2020.

Later that year, the property was acquired by Los Angeles Times Patrick Soon-Shiong through his company NantWorks, though most of the campus remained shuttered. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Soon-Shiong sought to use the campus as a coronavirus treatment and research center, according to the LA Times. 

At the end of last year, Yadin’s firm, St. Vincent Behavioral Health Campus LLC, purchased the property for $66.5 million, according to the LA Times. 

Reviving St. Vincent’s hospital

The full redevelopment is expected to cost roughly $300 million, Yadin said, and include more than 800 beds, including interim housing, permanent supportive housing, recuperative care and addiction treatment programs.

The project has rapidly gained support from the state and private sector at a time when California is investing billions into behavioral health infrastructure. The statewide measure Proposition 1 intends to expand treatment facilities, housing and services for people with serious mental illness and substance use disorders.

In a recent social media post, LA Mayor Karen Bass said St. Vincent is “what I’ve wanted to see happen for a long time: a place where people can get treatment, support, and build real, independent lives in permanent housing.”

In March, Gov. Gavin Newsom announced the St. Vincent campus would receive $135.8 million through Proposition 1’s funding to support new mental health and substance use treatment facilities planned for the site.

In April, Health Net and the Centene Foundation, private healthcare partners, also announced a $6 million investment in the campus.

Yadin said the project is designed around what he describes as a “continuum of care” model — bringing housing, treatment and support services together in one place rather than spreading them across different providers and locations.

“A lot of individuals, especially within the unsheltered population, fall between the cracks between one level of care and the next,” Yadin said. “For them to finish a program and then say, ‘Go to the other side of town to organization X to get the next level of care,’ oftentimes these individuals don’t make it.”

The St. Vincent campus is intended to centralize services in one location, something he says is desperately needed when considering unhoused residents.

Some unhoused residents, Narro said, are full-time workers who simply cannot afford rent. Others have been chronically homeless for years and need long-term support. Others struggle with severe addiction or mental illness.

“That’s the more complicated one,” Narro said. “So you have to have a special type of wraparound services for them, which I think this building has the potential for.”