Pushback Gets Safeway to Keep Fillmore Store Open Until 2025

After pushback from city officials and a Fillmore District community that didn’t want to lose its only supermarket, Safeway has agreed to keep its Webster Street store open until early 2025.

The supermarket chain set off an uproar earlier this month when it announced that it was selling the store, which has operated in the Fillmore neighborhood for several decades, to San Francisco-based developer Align Real Estate.

The original plan was to close the store in March to clear the way for Align to build a housing and retail development on the nearly four-acre site that encompasses the grocery and its parking lot. Employees at the Fillmore Safeway would have been reassigned to one of the Pleasanton-based chain’s 15 remaining supermarkets in San Francisco.

Dean Preston, a San Francisco supervisor whose district includes the Webster Street site, issued a statement two weeks ago calling the sudden closure of the area’s only remaining supermarket “unacceptable.” He also sent a letter to Safeway demanding it rescind the store closure.

“While my office is open to proposals for housing development on this large surface-level parking lot, we are extremely concerned with the potential loss of this grocery store in the heart of the Fillmore, and especially the possibility of losing it as soon as March, which we view as unacceptable,” Preston said, in the statement.

Preston, who, backed by Mayor London Breed, persuaded Safeway to postpone the deal until next year, now has proposed a new city law that would require groceries to provide six months’ advanced notice of any plans to close neighborhood-serving groceries.

The law also would require store owners to meet with community members prior to a grocery closure and explore a replacement supermarket, according to a report in the San Francisco Chronicle.

San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors approved a similar measure, known as the Supermarket Closure Ordinance in 1984, but it was vetoed by then-Mayor Dianne Feinstein.

Preston, who is calling the proposed law the Neighborhood Grocery Protection Act, announced the legislation during a rally at the Webster Street Safeway attended by three other San Francisco supervisors.

“It was a good idea then, and it’s an even better idea now. We need notice, we need transparency, community input and a transition plan when major neighborhood grocery stores plan to shut their doors,” Preston told the rally, according to the newspaper report.

Breed, who has been promoting adaptive re-use projects as a way to expand new housing, initially welcomed the redevelopment of the Fillmore store in a statement that called the project a “real and rare opportunity to add a significant amount of new homes” in Fillmore, an area that saw housing displaced by urban renewal projects in the 1960s.

Breed noted that a Trader Joe’s market is scheduled to open in Hayes Valley within a mile of Webster Street. She also said the redevelopment of the Safeway site might create an opportunity for another food market to be part of the project.