State law may delay Marina Safeway tower project in San Francisco

San Francisco Planning’s conditional eligibility notice for the Marina Safeway redevelopment may end up slowing the project it was supposed to expedite, because the city now faces an Aug. 1 deadline to take final action on the 11-15 Marina Boulevard proposal. The dispute centers on a 25-story tower in the Marina District that would replace the longtime Safeway with about 790 rental units, 86 of them affordable, while keeping a larger Safeway store on the ground floor.

The project is being advanced by Align Real Estate, and it moved into California’s AB 2011 fast-track process after San Francisco Planning issued the notice on March 24, 2026. AB 2011, the Affordable Housing and High Road Jobs Act of 2022, took effect on July 1, 2023 and created a streamlined, ministerial approval path for eligible housing on certain commercial sites, with CEQA exemption if labor and affordability standards are met. Align’s labor agreements with San Francisco building trades, secured in December 2025, helped make the Marina proposal eligible for that path.

That state-law shortcut has become the latest flash point in a neighborhood fight that has drawn in Mayor Daniel Lurie, who lives in District 2. Lurie has publicly opposed the project and said the developer was trying to “sneak in” the tower before the city’s new Family Zoning plan takes effect, a criticism that echoes objections from Marina residents and other elected officials who say a 25-story building would be out of scale for the waterfront neighborhood.

At the same time, the project’s backers and housing advocates see a rare chance to add homes in a part of San Francisco that has produced very little affordable housing in recent years. One report cited in the debate said the Marina neighborhood has built only 14 affordable homes since 2005, a number that has sharpened arguments over whether the city should preserve the current Safeway site or turn it into a much denser mixed-use project.

The Marina proposal has also become a test case for a broader wave of Safeway redevelopment plans across San Francisco, where citywide upzoning, labor politics and neighborhood resistance are colliding on the same parcel. For Marina residents, the immediate stakes are concrete: when the city acts, whether the neighborhood keeps its grocery store during construction, how quickly new housing can come online, and whether one of the city’s most recognizable supermarket sites becomes a precedent for similar conversions elsewhere.