Letter from San Francisco: Who’s afraid of the Marina Safeway towers?

Scroll down for Ian Adelman’s take on the new Instagram logo. But first, a report from the front lines of the San Francisco housing wars:

In 1950, following a postwar spike, San Francisco’s population stood at 775,357. Its current population is about 826,000. That’s an increase, over three-quarters of a century, of a measly six and a half percent. During the same period, the population of the greater Bay Area has grown by about 186 percent, or nearly thirty times as quickly, while California’s has gone up by 272 percent.

San Francisco’s median home price, meanwhile, has jumped from $12,000 in 1950 to about $1.7 million today—a tenfold increase after adjusting for inflation.

Another way to understand those figures is to take a stroll around San Francisco’s Marina District, as I did earlier this week on a characteristically chilly August afternoon. Or, to be more specific, to park in the surface lot in front of the Safeway grocery store that looks north out over Fort Mason, along the edge of San Francisco Bay, and, as the fog starts rolling in, begin walking and taking note of what you see.

The piece of land that holds this particular Safeway, designed with a gently curving roofline and a good deal of midcentury optimism by the San Francisco firm Wurster, Bernardi & Emmons and completed in 1959, has become arguably the most contentious single development site in the state. (For my money it has edged out both the proposed California Forever new town in Solano County and the thoroughly cursed parking lots near Venice Beach where Eric Owen Moss, Hollywood Community Housing Corporation, and the city of Los Angeles have been trying to build a permanent supportive housing complex since 2017 while catching absolute hellfire for their trouble.) It’s here that Align Real Estate and Albertsons, Safeway’s parent company, want to build an 848-unit complex, including 86 deed-restricted affordable units, crowned by a pair of towers (22 and 18 stories tall) and with a new grocery store channeling that Wurster design at its base.

The project, designed by the Miami-based firm Arquitectonica, has become a Rorschach test reflecting clashing opinions on the state of housing politics in San Francisco.