A proposal to turn San Francisco’s Marina Safeway site into a towering, dense housing project has courted controversy all year, with its district supervisor and neighborhood groups urging the city’s Planning Department to reject the project and its application for fast-track approval allowed under a California law designed to accelerate housing development.
But project developer Align Real Estate doubled down on the project’s density last week, submitting a revised application that increases the number of housing units to 848 from 790, even as it reduces the tallest housing tower from 25 to 22 floors. The new proposal nearly triples the studio apartment units to 254, while the number of guaranteed affordable units remains 86.
The project is poised for automatic ministerial approval by the Planning Department under Assembly Bill 2011, which removes local discretionary review powers for qualifying housing projects. It’s one of a raft of new so-called Yes in My Backyard — aka YIMBY — laws championed by local State Sen. Scott Wiener. The law gives the city 30 days to certify a project’s fast-track eligibility and then 90 days to approve it.
Supervisor Stephen Sherrill and six neighborhood associations wrote a June 25 letter to the Planning Department and Mayor Daniel Lurie urging them to reject the project’s review waivers. They argued that it didn’t meet the law’s criteria of having “urban uses” on at least 75% of its perimeter because it is bordered by Fort Mason parkland, the Marina Green and the San Francisco Marina Yacht Harbor.
“This request is not made lightly, and it is not made without significant research and legal clarification,” the letter reads. “Based on that work, we are confident that a determination that 11-15 Marina Boulevard is not surrounded by urban uses is reasonable and defensible.”
But that argument faces a battle as the department preliminarily certified the project’s eligibility in May. Lawyers for the developers also wrote a July 14 letter arguing the Yacht Harbor is an urban use and threatening legal action and administrative fines under the state law if the city denies the project’s eligibility.
“We appreciate that the Planning Department has not adopted, but rather disagrees with, the positions set forth in Supervisor Sherrill’s letters,” the lawyers wrote. “Nonetheless, out of an abundance of caution, we note that if the City were to suddenly change its position to adopt the positions set forth in those letters, it would expose the City to significant liability.”
Fast-track test case
The Marina Safeway project is San Francisco’s highest profile housing proposal to be speeding toward approval with minimal local input or control. It’s also the most ironic, given its opposition by Sherrill and Lurie, who otherwise support these new state laws purportedly designed to remedy California’s housing shortage and high housing costs.
Those laws and other state guidelines call on San Francisco to build 82,000 housing units by 2031, with 30% of that guaranteed affordable to those making the median income and below. Until the city meets its housing production goals, local officials lose their authority modify qualifying projects under the traditional discretionary review process, making it very difficult for local opponents to delay or defeat projects.
Those state laws drove the city’s December approval of the mayor’s Family Housing Plan, which could create 36,200 residential units by increasing allowable height and density mostly on the north and west sides of the city, including the Marina neighborhood. Without that plan, developers would have even greater ability to bypass local controls.
But the Marina Safeway developers submitted their proposal just weeks before that plan went into effect, allowing them to take advantage of old byzantine local zoning codes and state housing density bonuses to propose a project that is far taller and denser than the new plan would have allowed.
“We worked hard on the Family Zoning Plan to increase housing through much of San Francisco. We went parcel by parcel through the whole city,” Sherrill told the San Francisco Public Press. “To me, keeping with that vision is very important.”
Many local organizations opposed the Family Zoning Plan for its facilitation of more market-rate housing, including some signatories to Sherrill’s letter, including the Cow Hollow Association led by longtime president Lori Brooke, who lost her supervisorial race against Sherrill in June.
But the first signature following Sherrill’s belonged to Erin Roach, president of the Marina Community Association, which ended up supporting the plan, praising Sherrill for working closely with the group to maintain what it sees as reasonable height limits, and fiercely opposes the Marina Safeway proposal.
“These laws were made for simple infill projects, and this site is anything but,” Roach said, noting the site’s toxic history and its high-profile bayfront location. She said the project proposal should have to go through a proper California Environmental Quality Act review.
A lawyer for the community association and other local groups opposing the project wrote a May 1 letter to the city highlighting the former industrial site’s inclusion on a state list of hazardous material sites (officials with the Planning Department say it was removed from the list in 2024), its location in a flood zone, and the increased capacity burden so many new residents would place on the sewer system.
The waiver of that detailed environmental review is a key component of the new fast-track housing laws, which seek to speed housing development and therefore lowers its costs.
“It’s unfortunate that no matter which neighborhood you go to in San Francisco, someone will come up with arguments against housing,” said Matthew Lewis, communications director with California YIMBY, which worked on AB 2011 and similar laws. “The spirit and intent of AB 2011 was to get cities to develop urban infill sites like this one.”
Question of intent
The sponsor of AB 2011 was Assemblymember Buffy Wicks (D-Berkeley), whose office said she was abroad and unable to comment for this article. The law’s sole co-sponsor in the state Senate was Wiener, whose office refused to comment for this article, referring questions on the intent of the legislation to Wicks.
Wiener is in a runoff election against Supervisor Connie Chan to replace U.S. Rep. Nancy Pelosi, and his campaign office also did not respond to Public Press inquiries. But Wiener told Mission Local in a written response: “I support dense housing at the Marina Safeway site. The current proposal is reasonable, and the city has already zoned the site for 550 homes, even without state law. The city has long planned for dense housing here. I’m confident the developer will work with the City to refine the project to be the best possible.”
City planners say that while the latest Marina Safeway proposal addresses a number of technical flaws in the original proposal that the department highlighted in an April 29 “plan check letter,” the project’s increasing housing units and density were the developers’ decision, albeit one that falls under the 20% threshold that would deem it a new project.
“Our revised proposal will continue to deliver more homes than have been built in this neighborhood in the past 20 years, including 86 affordable homes,” David Balducci, principal of Align Real Estate, wrote in a prepared statement.“We believe these changes make a strong proposal even stronger, and we look forward to making it a reality.”
A project spokesperson did not respond when asked whether the changes to the project were intended to address community concerns or its financial viability. But their letter to the city notes, “the Applicant has made some modest adjustments that result in a more efficient Project.”
It highlighted changes that included reducing the height of its two towers; adding dwelling units, including more two-bedroom units (to 212 from 132) and some four-bedroom units; increasing retail/grocery square footage; reducing parking spots (to 340 in the new proposal, down from 473 ); and halving the space for residential amenities.
The Planning Department has until Aug. 13 to determine if the application is complete and meets state eligibility and local laws, then another 90 days to formally approve it.
“The City’s role in reviewing the Marina Safeway project is bracketed by State Law. Specifically, if the project follows the rules we are bound to approve it,” said Dan Sider, chief of staff at the San Francisco Planning Department, in an email. He added that “following any approval, construction drawings would need to be drafted by the builder and reviewed by the City before any construction could begin.”
Loss of local control
Urban planners in San Francisco and other jurisdictions are still getting used to the new legal regime that limits their power to help shape projects in favor of rubber-stamp certification under state guidelines. At one point in Sherrill’s letter, he seemed to rue the loss of local control, at least if read a certain way.
“This is a moment where the City of San Francisco not only can, but also has a responsibility to, make a policy decision as to whether we continue to build on recent progress by exercising the City’s own independent, fact-based judgment — or whether we allow private entities to decide what the laws mean by default,” he wrote.
But when asked about that line, he said, “I’m going to disagree. It’s not the YIMBY discussion of local control vs. state control. That is not what that line means.”
Sherrill said it referred only to whether to defer to the developers on what “urban infill” means and whether it applies to this property: “A private developer says it meets the checklist. We need to make that determination. This is not a fight between the state and the city.”
No, this is a fight between a developer and local residents opposing this project — and it’s a fight in which those residents have very little power to alter or stop the project because of new laws that politicians from the San Francisco Bay Area have championed.
Lewis, Wiener and other advocates of those laws say San Francisco and other California cities desperately need new housing, and limiting local challenges is the best way to lower costs and encourage developers to build. Lewis even said it was “inappropriate” for Sherrill to put political pressure on the Planning Department (a notion that Sider dismissed, saying anyone is free to urge action by city departments).
“They’re betting their lawyers can beat the City Hall lawyers, but every penny of that goes into the rent,” Lewis said, explaining how legal challenges, including the possibility of one against the Marina Safeway project, could drive up housing costs. “They’re free to drive up the cost that way.”
But to folks like Roach and her Marina Community Association, the issue is about how to refine a project that could affect her community’s health, infrastructure and quality of life.
The Marina Safeway project “is overwhelming our infrastructure. It’s just too big,” she said, later adding in an email that its newly increased density “exacerbates my concerns about overloading our infrastructure.”
She noted that with the developers allowed to skip environmental review and local design review, neighbors have no chance to weigh in on decisions that will directly affect them.
“The proposed 850 units equals an estimated 1,600 additional humans — a really significant 12% add to our population!” she wrote, referring to the potential increase in neighborhood residents. “Plus their cars and pets. None of these impacts is being considered pre-approval.”
Neighborhood groups opposing the Marina Safeway project are planning a town hall meeting on July 23 from 5:30 to 7 p.m. at Gallery 308 in Fort Mason Center. Click here for details and to RSVP.