The 25-story, nearly 800-unit housing complex slated for the Marina Safeway site is, to borrow the “Princess Bride” phrasing, inconceivable.
And not just for Marina neighborhood types or opponents of large developments — even developments that don’t resemble the tail end of a Princess cruise ship, as this one does.
Such an eventuality was inconceivable for sci-fi futurists, too. Take a brief respite from our bleak present day with this clip from the 2014 Disney animated film “Big Hero 6.”
A boy and his flying robot soar through the Abundance-on-steroids future city of “San Fransokyo.” It is a realm maximized for development, a clean and well-lighted “Blade Runner” cityscape of rows upon rows of skyscrapers keeping Salesforce Tower company.
And yet, even in this futuristic vision, there are no tall structures in the Marina. All Aquatic Park is missing from its present-day iteration is Aaron Peskin emerging from the waves.
Mayor Daniel Lurie and District 2 supervisor Stephen Sherrill have raised strong objections to the Marina Safeway development; they have shaken their fists with great vengeance and furious anger.
Erecting a massive, opulent housing complex in which only a piddling 11 percent of the units are slated to be affordable, over the lamentations of the district supervisor and the popular mayor, used to be, you know, inconceivable. Now, it’s conceivable.
That’s because state laws have changed radically since the era when “Big Hero 6” was a gleam in an illustrator’s eye. It no longer matters what a mayor or a supervisor or their disgruntled constituents think about a development’s size or impact or aesthetics.
Municipal elected officials or unelected neighborhood groups or power brokers can no longer wheel and deal. Local litigants cannot tie up projects in court. In many ways, the city’s planning department has been reduced to the referee at the professional wrestling match.
With this in mind, a group of around 20 Marina residents gathered in front of the Armistead Maupin Safeway on April Fool’s Day. They protested the proposed 25-floor tower as an out-of-scale cash grab, and pined for a six-to-eight story project of the sort proposed for other Safeway sites.
“Our call to action is to boycott Safeway,” said organizer Erin Roach, the president of the Marina Community Association. “The city has no power to stop this. They’re now just under ministerial approval. So we can appeal to Safeway as the landowner. Who’s going to profit from this? Why should we give them our business if they don’t listen to us?”
Roach summed up the call for a boycott as “desperate measures for desperate times.” It is that. But it would also seem to be a classic no-win scenario.
If, by some alchemy, large enough numbers of Marina dwellers affect the grocery giant’s bottom line, it reinforces the decision to put housing on this site, post haste. If they don’t make a dent, it reinforces the powerlessness of not just this citizens group but the city writ large to do a damn thing here.
In the end, the April 1 gathering served as a demonstration of something larger: It exemplified the legal sea change that, for good or ill, has left this and other California cities with little in the way of local control.
Mary Rose Hayes stood along Marina Boulevard on April Fool’s Day holding a green-on-white sign reading, “No 250ft Marina Tower!”
“I’ve lived in the neighborhood for 60 years. I’ve been shopping at the Marina Safeway since 1965,” she said. That’s well more than a decade before the store was immortalized as a heterosexual cruising site in “Tales from the City.”
“I’m 87 years old, and I plan on sticking around for a bit longer. So I would really like to see this not happen in my lifetime.”
Here’s hoping Hayes sticks around for a good long time. But, on the development front, she’ll probably be disappointed — and not just because this project will top out at 297.5 feet, not 250.
All signs indicate that this is happening, and likely happening fast by San Francisco standards.
Broadly, that’s for two reasons: It’s a lot harder for the government or other oppositional groups to deploy legal impediments. And, on the private side of things, the singular attractiveness of this lucrative site will likely elicit the financing that eludes so many of the nearly 75,000 approved but unbuilt projects scattered throughout the city.
Let’s start with the public side. In the past, there were so, so many ways the city could’ve derailed this project that nothing resembling it would ever have been proposed.
Even as recently as, say, 2022, a hulking tower in an area zoned for four stories would’ve required a majority of the Board of Supervisors to make a legislative alteration to the city’s zoning ordinance. The wishes of the home supervisor would have very likely been adhered to in this matter.
There would be planning commission meetings, planning commission votes and then more votes by the Board of Supervisors. And then, after all that, if things got that far, there would be a mandated environmental analysis.
The soil beneath the Marina is a mixture of 1906 rubble, Cream of Wheat and toxic cooties from the aptly named “Gas House Cove,” so that analysis would make for interesting reading.
On top of whatever it revealed, any Tom, Dick or Harry could bring up his pet theory on lurking environmental concerns, which could be rational but didn’t have to be. The city would be duty-bound to give it all a fair hearing.
And then, after all that, any permit issued by any city department was eligible to be challenged via a “Discretionary Review.” A 297.5-foot tower is not a kitchen remodel, and many permits are required here. The leverage these layers upon layers of process gave the city’s elected and appointed gatekeepers was significant.
Seen one way, it was a means to extract community amenities, open space and affordable units from developers. Seen another, it was a sop to politically aligned nonprofits. Or a potential kill switch. Or all of these. It could be all of these. Regardless, that’s gone now.
And now the private side: Folks tied to this project are optimistic not just that it’ll get built, but get built quickly. Ground broken before the next Super Bowl. People living here before Stephen Sherrill or Daniel Lurie would have to run again. You know: Quickly.
And why is that? Because a giant Princess Cruise derrière in the sky towering over a part of the city that even sci-fi futurists didn’t dream would be the site of massive high-end housing complexes is a gold mine.
Banks like gold mines. Banks finance gold mines.
No elected officials showed up at the April Fool’s Day Safeway protest. District 2 candidate Lori Brooke said she supports her neighbors’ call for a boycott. The mayor’s office blew off the question. Sherrill answered the question twice without answering the question.
A small group of neighborhood folks calling for a boycott of a multibillion-dollar corporation is a symbol of the futility of this city attempting a headlong charge against state laws expressly designed to emasculate this city.
But the 11-percent-affordable Princess Cruise derrière is, itself, a symbol of the limitations of these laws to actually facilitate significant development. This project is all but certainly going to get financing because this project is exceptional. But not every project is exceptional.
And there’s only so much local or even state law can do to counter global capital. If merely approving a project resulted in its construction, San Francisco would have scores of thousands of additional built units. It doesn’t.
That’s something for Marina denizens to think about as the Safeway is shuttered for however long it takes to complete this development. In the meantime, the Grocery Outlet is set to open this summer at NorthPoint.
“Big Hero 6” didn’t foresee that, either.
Additional reporting by Nicholas David.
This article reads exactly the same as those decrying the Transamerica Building when it was first proposed. Yet instead of a genuinely massive skyscraper for a national bank, this is badly needed housing in a wealthy neighborhood that has – up until now – succeeded in banning any substantial new housing for decades. I’m having trouble finding too much sympathy for those boycotting Safeway over this.
I wonder if the people who use the word “developer” like it’s an offensive slur know how out of touch they are with the median SF voter.
People decry “greedy developers,” but someone has to build the housing. Far worse to me is the greed of the NIMBYs, whose only interest is maintaining their property values.
Looks like the developer lined up some upvotes. Few articles here get so many likes.
TLDR.
The Marina Safeway project in concert of the other proposed Safeway “Grands Projets” are truly outstanding proposals.
As it was with the Golden Gate Bridge and Transamerica Pyramid before them, once completed, all this absurd “sturm und drang” and hyperbolic handwringing will evaporate.
And in all likelihood, addition to becoming major contributors to SF’s economic vitality, a number of them — like their aforementioned predecessors — could very well become aesthetic icons of the City as well.
The Pyramid’s butt ugly & so is this thing.
Everything you list that formerly could have been done and now cannot to stop this housing was just the NIMBY arsenal. Weapons for nearby landowners to assert influence well beyond their property lines. I’m delighted they’ve been disarmed. We will never reach the state-mandated unit numbers, but let us build *something*.
Don’t understand how this project is bad. Seems like they same tired NIMBY talking points.
It displaces no one, including the Safeway, which will return as part of the new building. It creates 88 affordable units (zero exist there today and that # would be the equivalent units of a 45% affordable 8-story building), plus I think it looks nice.
Find some drawings that show the building from the backside and how that looks like.
How ’bout a joke, Marina NIMBYs?
What do you get when you cross some of the most expensive residential real estate land on Earth, with decades spent stubbornly blockading any effort to add even the most modest, livable, European-scale urban density?
You get what you f**king deserve!
I personally can’t wait for denser housing to be built in SF. The construction of single family homes in such a dense city is nothing more than a way to keep Hoi Polloi out. I especially love that this project is being built in a hood that is predominately white and upper middle class. Eat the rich!
Everyone needs to visit Singapore- thats the model we should be using (also the 80% social housing…) We need 20 more of these princess cruises in the works ASAP
This is only 12% “affordable,” not 80% social housing. We can do better.
If obstructionism resulted in affordability, why is San Francisco the poster child of America’s most unaffordable city? What city models themselves after San Francisco’s legacy approach to planning? This euology for stranger control over other people’s housing (referred to as local control) makes one wonder where the euology is for the thousands of homes built out in the Bay Area’s urban fringe in the last 20 years to house the people that work in San Francisco and aren’t rich? The gentrification of Oakland and Richmond for San Francisco’s workforce is more dystopian than this rather unremarkable complex. Few mourn for the cooks, waiters, baristas that commute in at 4 AM to serve some of the wealthiest people on Earth and maintain SF’s illusion as a self sustaining city, and not the commuter Disneyland it became in the last 30 years. The millionaires and high six figure earners of the Marina are not the downtrodden being “emasculated” by state law. Said emasculation being that if a city determines a parcel safe for residential use that it shouldn’t be revoking that designation arbitrarily or cap the number of people who can live there. In most developed nations this is the norm.
If it is good for the rest of the city, it should be good for the Marina, too.
But! What if we try to be more moderate and just encourage 6-8 story complexes throughout the city? Way more manageable, more in line with what we already have, and more apt to be approved without incident.
Joe, haven’t you ever watched Star Trek? It’s obvious that San Francisco will eventually embrace the cold Vulcan logic of up-zoning, but maybe not fully so until the 22nd century.
Now personally, I would prefer it if this building looked less like a cruise ship, and more like a nuclear wessel. If not for me, than for the whales.
Given that transporters exist in the Star Trek’s 23d century, why would anyone need to pen themselves up in a SF condo, when they could live anywhere and commute to work via transporter?
Fortunately, the Presidio has not been developed, and is awaiting its future as home to Starfleet Academy and Headquarters.
Picard lived in the south of France and just beamed over for meetings. It’s like COVID.
My only question is can they realign Marina/Laguna through the Safeway parking lot a bit to eliminate the choke point for people walking and biking from upper Fort Mason. 😛
Well, it’s a little taller than the 6-story Paris model suggested in an opinion piece by Allison Arieff in last Sunday’s Chron, but, still, housing is housing. I’m for it.
if i recall, those FOOLS also don’t want cell towers on their neighborhood but yet complain about bad signals or dropped calls !
I’m glad there is some acknowledgement at the beginning of the article that this apartment building is fun. Archihttps://arquitectonica.com/ is is good aritecture firm, and I think the design has qualities that most of us associate with the Marina. Youthful high spirits.
You know that these kinds of diatribes are the reason why San Francisco has a housing crisis, right? Honestly you ought to be embarrassed. Thank GOD the city now has way fewer avenues to tie things up in red tape. Maybe someday normal people will be able to afford to buy here again.
YIMBY = garbage pseudo-grassroots give-a-shit-ism about lower incomes.
They lie. They don’t care.
they used to care. now it’s the equivalent of a bunch of magas demanding we all believe in trickle-down housing. There’s literally nothing you can ever do that won’t get you called a commie…. I mean, nimby
Try spending time on the lawn at Fort Mason at sunset. The water, views of the bridge, the sky – it’s a major tourist attraction. And it’s magical. It belongs to everyone. Then visualize what it will look like if this ghastly project is built and you’ll understand the opposition.
Hey now the Marina knows exactly how the Richmond and Sunset Districts feel when interlopers come in and destroy the integrity of their home.
I am not opposed to development, but one thing bothers me and I cannot un-see it.
The proposed building looks like a mashup of the destroyed Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, and the Watergate Complex in Washington DC — Two very recognizable buildings from fairly recent US history.
These people are smart.
Build up-votes in local media comments.
5 million dollar and up, up, up condos are a wonderful thing.
Just think of all the shiny white people moving in to beautify the white shiny Marina even more. Nice BMW’s and Tesla’s too!
They’re coming to rip up Pacific Heights, Russian/Telegraph hill next.
The gift of schadenfreude relative to the rich suffering the fruits of The Weiner is all you really have to look forward to.
And, yeah – opiniated newcomers insisting San Francisco turn into Singapore ’cause they expect nice $800 a month 1 bedroom units are going to bloom in Noe Valley in the very near future.
With 80,000 people on the list – you ain’t gonna live on the Princess Cruise liner. Ain’t no “cooks, waiters, baristas” gonna make it either – betcha.
Anyway – for Mission Local – what a strange comments section for this story.
The comments section being one of the highlights of this publication.
Perhaps the Influencers have discovered the ever increasing presence of Mission Local as a top tier news organization. Pity.
Blame Scott Wiener please,
I can’t believe you wrote this entire thing without mentioning that the person who wrote the series of State laws that make this behemoth possible was Scott Wiener.
That just might influence a few votes in the smoking Congressional race.
go Niners !!
h.
I’m not sure it’s going to influence voters in the way you expect. Laws that allow for housing to be built in wealthy neighborhoods are quite popular.
It’s as if Marie Antoinette were earnestly trying to rally popular outrage against a law that would disrupt the supply of sugar to the royal pastry kitchen.
CORRECTION: Blame 50+ years of increasingly-onerous, NIMBY-driven, I’ve-got-mine-so-screw-everybody-else, anti-housing policies.
Sounds like we can thank Scott Wiener.
Blame the land use progressives who were unable and unwilling to do what it took to beat Scott Wiener. They said they had our backs but were only watching out for their wallets. Why do these people still get paid?
I wish we were able to have a say in what massive buildings were put up without a herd of people using NIMBY the way republicans use Libtard.
Once upon a time, NIMBY was when we wanted to build section 8 housing and public housing and homeless shelters and affordable housing and people who lived there didn’t want it in their back yard. Now, even though I was literally involved in getting public housing put up and putting in section 8 housing and fighting for homeless shelters right near me, if I say anything negative about literally ANY new building, I’m attacked viciously.
It’s really disappointing how the “yimby” people have been so utterly misled and rather than supporting actual housing for locals, they just believe in “trickle down” housing, where massive luxury condos in the most expensive parts of town are suddenly going to create inexpensive units elsewhere. No matter how much evidence to the contrary, it’s like debating solar power with someone who insists it’s a stupid idea because of night-time.
We’re better than this people. Maybe it’s a good project, maybe it’s not. But let’s not pretend that this will somehow make housing more affordable in San Francisco and attack others who think it’s a bad move.
To be fair, in this comment you’re not just “saying anything negative about literally ANY new building”, you’re describing those you disagree with as a “herd” whose thought processes are on par with Republicans. Is it really all that surprising that someone might take offense?
(Ironically enough, it sort of resembles the way a Republican might complain about having been “cancelled” merely for their “politically incorrect” beliefs, then if you look into their actual language use, you find a firehose torrent of unprintable slurs that’d make a Grand Dragon blush.)
As far as the issue itself, it’s also pretty unsurprising that people might take offense at the stance that opposition to an adequate supply of new market-rate housing is acceptably offset by support for subsidized housing and homeless shelters. “Hey, I know you can’t afford to buy a house, and I’m fine with that if the alternative might mean a new condo tower blocking the sightline from my rooftop patio to Fort Point… but can I interest you in this nice new shelter bed?”
IINM during the Loma Prieta quake, buildings in that area were damaged; is this a smart location to build on? That said, the housing deficit is NOT in the luxury market. What we DO need are hundreds, perhaps thousands of affordable/social housing units. Do I have to say, “developers, bankers” don’t put money into that segment voluntarily?
District two voted for Scott Wiener, three times, who ran on gifting San Francisco to developers, three times.
Cry me a river that the Marina might get what D2 supes have gone all-in pro-developer, forcing upzonings the Eastern Neighborhoods and Market Octavia.
“ gifting San Francisco to developers”
No mention of the people who will live in the dwellings they develop for generations to come?
This is the supply side “creating jobs” argument, only for housing, out of the goodness of developers, lenders, architects and consultants’ deep hearts.
San Francisco is a princess and should be made to hike her skirt up for the first pimp to call her pretty.
So if I understand your analogy correctly, you’re saying that a housing development like the Marina Safeway project would spoil or devalue San Francisco in the same way as a woman would be spoiled or devalued by losing her virginity?
Maybe it’s just me, but depicting NIMBYism as the housing policy equivalent of patriarchal purity-obsessed social conservatism (and framing that as a good thing) doesn’t exactly help your case that the YIMBYs are the real right-wingers here.
this is exactly what has happened here in SF. I don’t know how people don’t see it.
A lot of comments here in favor of the project get about 20 up votes. The comments critical of Wiener or against the project get about 20 down votes. Seems like a suspicious coincidence to me.
Yes, it could be a conspiracy. Or perhaps a lot of people in SF want to build more housing.
“Starting in the low millions”. Thank you Scott Wiener for this mess. And if this wasn’t enough, add insult to injury: He and his YIMBY boosters have found zero dollars to fund housing that would actually help everyday people. All that was going to happen is to “crack open” San Francisco for ultra-luxury prestige projects, and here we go.
80+ subsidized units in a neighborhood that would never have them otherwise.
That’s not “zero dollars.” That’s 80 low income people who can live in one of the nicest neighborhoods in the country.
Such an incredible project and sure to be a building that is admired in the decades to come.
The more low income units that were available to “everyday people” in this building, the more these same Marina NIMBYs would’ve fought it.
It’s hilarious that we’re supposed to pretend the opponents in the neighborhood would have been more favorable to a large apartment complex here if only the eventual residents were _less_ well off.
“80+ subsidized units”
That’s simply added to the price of admission for the other units. Not that it matters much in this case. Point remains though, let’s have a look at the Potrero bus yard project, where YIMBYs (or others) couldn’t be bothered to even try find the funds for a larger build than what SFMTA eventually landed at.
Since 2005 a mere 14 affordable units have been constructed in the Marina District.
This project alone, which includes 86 affordable units, is over 6 times that
.
And all without having to spend a dime of taxpayer funds.
“That’s simply added to the price of admission for the other units.“
Umm yes obviously? Either you pay for it via overall build cost or you pay for it with taxes. Not sure what your point is.
Re: Potrero bus yard, that project fell apart because:
1) Nimby groups in the Mission fought the proposal to fund subsidized units with market rate.
2) SF residents voted down a bond measure for Muni.
3) Said Nimby obstructionism elongated the development timeline to such an extent that cost to build increased dramatically
4) Muni ridership fell due to the pandemic and changing usage patterns
Tell me again how Yimby advocates are to blame for the sorry state of affairs of the Potrero project?
“advocates”. That’s the issue right there. It is high time these good people step up to the table and deliver funding to actually build housing.
There was no opposition to housing on the Potrero site. The decision to curtail the development envelope was wholly internal to SFMTA.
There are many, many other locations this Miami-style eyesore could be hidden away, but not there across from one of the city’s most pleasant natural spaces. Unfortunately, SF has gotten it far wrong more than right in this regard, and it’s disgraceful another blight simply due to greed.
How come you didn’t mention the “Princess Rat” Scott Weiner who is in bed with the banks and real estate interests and stripped communities of local control? Weiner is Trump in progressive drag!
Sherrill: Got to do what the state says.
Lurie: Got to do what the state says.
Wiener: Got to do what the state says.
Locals, visitors, tourists: But you are the state. Stop it!
The elected: $$$ 😛
San Francisco has consistently been voting for YIMBYs for the last few years. This kind of development – housing replacing a parking lot in a wealthy neighborhood – is exactly what a majority of Californians want.
Lenders and developers have been flooding the political system with cash for the past 15 years after Wall Street deregulation took hold the resulting fractional reserve windfall burned holes in their wallets.
Exactly. We had to do what the state said in terms of not gerrymandering, but Newscum was easily able to get rid of that. The state’s “mandate” is such BS. No one can afford any of the housing that is being built. L.A. County has a net negative population growth of more than 50,000 recently, and housing prices still go up. Why? Because rich people buying 5th houses doesn’t solve the housing crisis.
There are plenty of homes in California. They’re not just not available or cheap enough. Building more won’t make them cheaper, just as paying Elon Musk more won’t make working-class people richer.