The Safeway that has served San Francisco’s Fillmore neighborhood for some 40 years is closing, and it’s been big news for months.
The community uproar prompted the Board of Supervisors to dust off a proposal, as old as the market itself, to force grocery stores to provide at least six months’ notice before closing. They passed it unanimously. The board had also negotiated an 11-month extension of the market’s life, meaning the last shopping cart rolls back into the corral February 7.
“We’re seeing food deserts form before our eyes,” says Sup. Bilal Mahmood, who represents the Fillmore’s District 5, in an email to The Frisc. The Board of Supervisors is holding a hearing Monday at Mahmood’s request.
Angry community members have noted that Safeway originally got a sweetheart deal from the city as part of the Fillmore’s notorious urban renewal.
Food deserts are areas in major cities with no grocery retail within roughly a half-mile or mile. (The definition depends on the analysis.) When longtime stores close, it can take years to fill the vacancy, if at all. Neighbors might have to travel long distances on public transit or rely on less healthy options, such as fast food and convenience stores.
SF’s Food Security Taskforce cited the closure as a threat in its 2024 report: “Food insecurity among low-income San Franciscan households increased drastically between 2021 and 2022.” It notes that nearly 117,000 residents in the city’s lowest income brackets frequently worry where their next meal will come from.
Days before last November’s election and Mahmood’s victory, his predecessor Dean Preston blamed “corporate elites behind closed doors” for neighborhood groceries closing.
But that’s not always the case. Another grocery closure, in a neighborhood several miles away from the Fillmore but with obvious links to its charged politics and racial history, shows how SF’s good intentions can be a factor too.
Yanking the chain
Last week, the SF Planning Commission approved a new rock climbing gym at 2900 Alemany Boulevard, sandwiched between the Oceanview and Outer Mission neighborhoods. The cavernous building, more than 33,000 square feet, has been vacant for years, attracting squatters and graffiti, and the new tenant is a local business with a good reputation.
Until it went vacant in 2023, the building had hosted multiple grocery stores since at least the early 1960s, as seen in ads in archived SF newspapers.
The most recent was Pacific Supermarket, which had been there for 30 years. “They were just done,” building owner David Paulus tells The Frisc. The longtime tenants were tired of the business and fretted about crime and slow police responses. SFPD records show the store was burglarized in 2018, and a woman was injured in a shootout in the parking lot in 2014.
Paulus says he assumed another grocery would move right in, as the size is a tricky fit for other businesses: “Not a lot of places are going to fill all of that.”
Safeway and Smart & Final both passed on the chance, according to Paulus, and the space is actually too big for a Trader Joe’s. Paulus acknowledges he could have filled it with 88 Seafood Supermarket, but they didn’t divulge enough financial information for his comfort, or with Grocery Outlet, which put in what he calls a lowball bid.
(None of the companies returned requests for comment.)
Finally in early 2023, Island Pacific Supermarket signed a lease. It’s a chain that caters to Filipino-American customers across California and Nevada, not to be confused with Pacific Supermarket, the previous tenant.
But San Francisco has laws restricting “formula retail” – chains with more than 11 locations worldwide – and demands special permits that can take more than a year to acquire.
Paulus says Island Pacific balked and backed out. In documents submitted to SF Planning, Island Pacific CEO Nino Jefferson Lim is quoted saying, “I will never lease a building in San Francisco.” Lim did not return requests for comment.
Piece of the rock
Finally in early 2024, Mission-based Touchstone Climbing made an offer on the space, and on January 23 the Planning Commission gave it a green light with a unanimous vote and no debate. “It’s a great location, a great neighborhood — an underserved neighborhood,” Touchstone spokesperson Emma Kim tells The Frisc.
It’s a happy ending for the landlord and his new tenant, but less so for a neighborhood that had relied on a market there for decades.
The Department of Public Health’s 2023 food security report (the most recent available) highlights Oceanview, along with the Tenderloin and Bayview, as neighborhoods with the highest concentrations of “nutrition-related health disparities.”
Asked if the Alemany closure is comparable to the Safeway loss, Mahmood notes that SF food deserts are “disproportionately impacting communities of color.”
Staff for Sup. Chyanne Chen, whose district includes the Alemany site, fielded queries for this story, but Chen did not provide comment. (Chen joined the board in January and was not in office during the Pacific Supermarket’s closure.)
Approved in 2004 and expanded by voters in 2007, SF’s chain store rules were meant to preserve “unique community character” and “neighborhood individuality,” as many residents feared mom-and-pop shops could not compete with big retailers.
The rules are so strict that even a small local taqueria chain ran afoul of them in 2021. The pandemic and unchecked growth of online retail have further complicated those rules; chain outlets are ironically some of the city’s best defenses against chronically empty storefronts and commercial district blight.
Sabine Dabady, formerly a manager at Mandela Partners, an Oakland nonprofit dedicated to food equity, says that it can be deceptively difficult for independent chains and small stores to succeed in cities like San Francisco. “Financing can be pretty arduous,” Dabady tells The Frisc. “That’s why chains are as big as they are.”
‘Steered out of other neighborhoods’
Oceanview sprung up in the mid-19th century around a train station. (The 280 freeway traces the now vanished rail line.) Originally a hub for Irish, Italian, and German immigrants, Oceanview (or for this local historian, Ocean View) was one of the few neighborhoods where Black San Franciscans could buy homes after World War II. After redevelopment tore through the Fillmore, more Black residents relocated to this southwestern corner of the city.
“Steered out of other west side neighborhoods, Oceanview was over 60 percent African-American in the 1960s and may have been higher in the early 1970s,” says SF Heritage President Woody Labounty.
Today, the larger Oceanview/Merced/Ingleside (OMI) neighborhood is home to about 28,000 people, according to census and city data. More than half the neighborhood is Asian, similar to Daly City just across the county line, with a significant Black and Latino presence.
SF’s chain store rules were meant to preserve ‘unique community character’ and ‘neighborhood individuality.’
Nearly half (46 percent) of OMI residents here are first-generation immigrants. When last surveyed, the median income was just over $72,000 — well below average in SF.
Most residents own their homes, and the median homeowner moved in back in 1983. This is not unusual in working class and immigrant neighborhoods where cheap housing stock attracted previous generations of buyers who then passed those homes on to descendants.
Residents have demanded better food access in the recent past, with the arrival of Korean chain H Mart in 2019 filling another yearslong empty store about a mile away.
San Francisco politicians are now quite attuned to food security, but they have limited power to intercede. In 2011, the late Mayor Ed Lee cut the ribbon on a Fresh & Easy grocery in the Bayview meant to relieve one of the city’s most infamous food deserts, saying it would “help make the neighborhood a place where families will want to stay and thrive.” It closed two years later. Lee tried again in 2016 with local grocer Duc Loi and another big photo-op. That also failed.
In his 2021 book Retail Inequality, sociologist Kenneth Kolb seized on the Fresh & Easy debacle as an example of institutions – including government, businesses, and academics – not listening to local communities.
Market forces are complicated enough for a location like 2900 Alemany, which might not be attractive to well-known brands that are careful not to compete with themselves. (There’s a Safeway and a Whole Foods a little over a mile away.) And smaller enterprises don’t have the same resources to keep a location like this open through lean years, on top of San Francisco’s rents, addiction to online shopping, and the extra hoops of chain-store rules to jump through.
But unlike the Fillmore Safeway, the prospect of losing a key food hub at 2900 Alemany for an underserved part of San Francisco hasn’t triggered a board hearing, revived any old laws, or spurred calls to rethink the city’s chain store stance.
Despite Oceanview’s prominence in the 2023 report on nutrition and health disparities, the empty 2900 Alemany gets no mention in recent Food Security Taskforce reports.
It’s nice for fitness-minded neighbors that Touchstone is filling the space, and that the property won’t remain blighted for years to come. But the deal can also be seen as a deeper community need that has fallen through the cracks.
