On a Wednesday afternoon in July, just a block from City Hall, the Heart of the City Farmers’ Market is bustling with hundreds of customers. People from across San Francisco go to Civic Center each Wednesday and Sunday in search of healthful, affordable groceries, a resource many don’t have in their corners of the city. Piles of produce and other foods from dozens of northern and central California growers, from peaches and okra to habanero peppers and honey, nestle under canopies spanning Fulton Street between Hyde and Larkin Streets.
Elizabeth Yelton, 74, who has lived in the Mission district for 43 years, commutes to the farmers market on her bike. She said there are few affordable grocers in her neighborhood and she prefers to avoid Whole Foods. “Which is why I love coming here, because it’s the only affordable farmers market right now. You go to other farmers markets and, like, things are so expensive,” Yelton said.
That’s only one aspect of accessibility for Yelton. As she gets older, she worries, she won’t be able to get to the market on her bike. She doesn’t own a car. Last year, she was injured in a bike accident and struggled to access a grocer without her bike. “Having a close, affordable grocery store in that circumstance would make a huge difference.”
A 2023 city report found that people living in San Francisco were far more likely to face food insecurity than other Californians. Two-thirds of San Francisco adults who made less than $27,180 a year — that was twice the Federal Poverty Level for a single adult in 2022 — were food insecure, compared to forty-four percent statewide. One in five city residents fall into this income bracket. The report stated also that the rate of people facing food insecurity in the city more than doubled after the cessation of COVID-era food support and that by 2023, the city had the “highest rate of food insecurity for low-income San Francisco adults” since data collection began in 2001.
Despite these dire statistics, city officials disagree on how to address food insecurity. Supervisor Bilal Mahmood sought to put a tax on vacant storefronts on the November ballot but met opposition from his board colleagues. Now, Mahmood is proposing an ordinance to incentivize stores to open.
People face food insecurity when they don’t have enough to eat and don’t know where their next meal will come from. According to the San Francisco Food Security Task Force, food costs rose by about 23% from 2020 to 2024.
This hurts many San Franciscans, with Black and Indigenous communities facing the highest concentration of nutrition-related health problems, like heart disease and diabetes. Black and Indigenous households make less than half of San Francisco’s median household income and represent less than 8% of the city’s population.
A supervisor makes multiple attempts to bring back affordable grocery stores
Mahmood’s 5th district stretches from the Tenderloin to the Golden Gate Park Panhandle. In an interview with the San Francisco Public Press, he said he’s been working to get an affordable grocer in his district since he was elected over a year ago.
“We are seeing an escalating food desert crisis emerging in multiple neighborhoods throughout the city, including in District 5,” he said. He pointed to the closure of a Lucky’s on Fulton Street, a Whole Foods in Mid-Market that closed just one year after opening, and the Safeway that served residents in the Fillmore District — about a mile from the farmers’ market — for 40 years before shutting its doors in 2025. It was the only full-service grocer in the historically Black, low-income neighborhood.
“That’s problematic for our district, because these are all neighborhoods that have some vulnerable, important communities. The Tenderloin has the highest concentration of children — 3,500 kids, more than any other neighborhood in the city — and families,” Mahmood said.
On July 21, Mahmood announced that he was drafting a set of local laws that he will present to the Board of Supervisors. He calls the package the New Affordable Groceries Act.
The ordinance is intended to resuscitate a city program that helped corner stores provide healthful produce. It would also exempt new grocers from certain permit fees, as well as expand the Storefront Opportunity Grant to provide funding for new grocers in food deserts. It would offer incentives for housing developments that include new grocers on the ground floor, modeled on NYC’s FRESH program.
Mahmood said he would spend the next few months working out the logistics of these programs.
The ordinances mark Mahmood’s second attempt to propose solutions to food insecurity to the Board of Supervisors. In July, he proposed two ambitious measures that needed board approval to appear on the November ballot but they died in committee.
The Abandoned Pharmacy and Grocery Tax would have taxed companies that have let supermarkets and pharmacies sit vacant for years, like the Fillmore Safeway and the Mid-Market Whole Foods.
The Affordable Grocery Fund could have utilized funds generated by the tax to convert corner stores into low-cost, fresh produce stores and cover costs associated with bringing grocers into a neighborhood through grants and loans. The fund would also have enabled the city to purchase land to lease directly to affordable grocers at below-market rates.
Board Budget Committee Chair Connie Chan said the tax proposal “wasn’t ready” and pulled it from the committee’s agenda on July 8. Mahmood claimed she did so at Mayor Daniel Lurie’s request and that Amazon, Whole Foods’ parent company, had exerted pressure against it.
He said 61% of San Francisco voters, meanwhile, supported a vacant-grocery tax. Sprouts, Grocery Outlet and Smart & Final have bid to take over the empty Fillmore Safeway. Negotiations failed for all three.
“And so the narrative that grocery operators don’t want to come to San Francisco is not true,” Mahmood said. “It is in their interest to keep it vacant to block competition.”
Mahmood gets inspiration from near and far
Mahmood said he was inspired by New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s strides in proposing bold solutions to persistent city problems.
“I think what people really want here is solutions, and that’s the core of what was effective about Mamdani. He didn’t just describe a problem; he provided a vision on how to solve it. And I think that’s what’s been missing in San Francisco for a long time,” Mahmood said.
A pillar of Mamdani’s mayoral campaign was a proposal to bring a new grocer to each of New York’s five boroughs by 2029. His administration created the NYC Fresh Program, which aims to create a network of city-owned grocers with food available at 30% below typical retail prices.
The program prioritizes using city-owned sites to create grocery stores and has allocated $70 million for their construction. It has earmarked $30 million so far to build a store in East Harlem. A second store will be integrated into the conversion of a juvenile detention center to 100% affordable housing.
Under this model, the city also covers overhead costs like rent and construction. A private operator manages daily operations and is contractually required to pass these savings directly to customers.
Mahmood acknowledges that the political realities here are much different from those in New York. For example, San Francisco is less densely populated and the median income is higher.
“We have to work with the tools that are available to us and what is possible to pass with this current Board of Supervisors and with this mayor,” Mahmood said. He said he wished the local government was more keen on corporate accountability. “But we have to make sure that we’re passing what we can to make as much progress as we can right now.”
New York isn’t his only inspiration. Mahmood said he’s also looking at efforts that San Francisco failed to renew. For instance, his proposal would resurrect the Healthy Retail SF program, which transformed 10 tobacco and liquor stores across the city nearly a decade ago into stores with fresh produce. The program reported bringing in more revenue for participating stores and increasing access to healthful foods in areas like Bayview, Hunters Point and the Tenderloin.
The mayor’s Office of Economic and Workforce Development operated the program. Katie Reardon, the office’s senior project manager, told the San Francisco Public Press that the program ended in 2021 due to “contractual delays and funding.” She said most of the program’s funding came from the Sugary Beverage Tax, which is still active.
The intention, however, was to help stores encourage healthy purchases. “The Healthy Retail SF program was never designed to address food grocery affordability,” Reardon said.
In the next year, Mahmood said he hopes to secure funding for at least a couple of stores to pilot the program. His long-term objective, though, is getting a full-service grocer back in the Fillmore.
Lurie is taking a different approach. On July 28, he announced legislation that would create an Office of Food Security Coordination within the San Francisco Human Services Agency, which would coordinate citywide efforts to remedy food insecurity. He also proposed a Food Security Council to focus on solutions for healthful food access. The Food Security Task Force, an advisory board that studied food insecurity and provided recommendations to the city since 2022, disbanded on July 1.
Lura Jones, a member of the task force and senior program manager at Leah’s Pantry, a nonprofit in the Mission, noted that the task force had spent years researching and organizing solutions around food insecurity. In 2024, the task force recommended creating an Office of Food to implement and oversee a citywide food security plan, coordinate various city departments and track data on local food systems. They continued to make this recommendation through this year.
Jones says she’s disappointed that this effort never actualized, but she hopes Lurie’s plan will include the community behind the recommendations. “They’re seeing a problem. They come up with a solution without a lot of community input around it, and that’s why I think that the things they’ve tried haven’t succeeded,” Jones said.
Mahmood says the mayor’s office has not reached out to his office about the proposals, but he looks forward to reading the legislation when it’s complete.