Big-chain formula retail stores might soon be welcome again on Van Ness Avenue, plus there’s now an added a carve-out to include the shuttered Fillmore Safeway too, after the SF Board of Supervisors eliminated these formula retail restrictions.
Back in January, newly sworn-in SF Supervisors Stephen Sherrill and Danny Sauter proposed their first piece of joint legislation, to remove the formula retail ban from Van Ness Avenue. San Francisco’s formula retail ban is not really a full “ban,” but was passed by SF voters in 2007, and forces retailers that have more than 11 locations to get a special conditional-use permit to open a new location in certain parts of San Francisco. And we wondered when Sherrill and Sauter introduced the proposal, why only the Van Ness corridor, and not other neighborhoods with high vacancies?
Well, today the SF Board of Supervisors just unanimously approved lifting that formula retail ban from Van Ness Avenue. And they did also act to fill a high-profile vacancy in another neighborhood, amending the legislation to also include the recently shuttered Fillmore Safeway property at Webster and Ellis streets.
“Planning Department surveys found a 53% ground-floor commercial vacancy rate on Van Ness, compared to the rest of the city’s 7.7% vacancy rate, or even Union Square’s shockingly high 22% vacancy rate,” Sherrill said before the vote. “The 50% vacancy rates on Van Ness are a crisis.”
While the formula retail chains can currently get authorized for an exemption from the ban, that authorization usually requires around seven to eight months of City Hall red tape, according to Sherrill.
And there’s the interesting inclusion of the Fillmore Safeway, which is very much not on Van Ness. Thanks to a loophole rule that Supervisor Bilal Mahmood added and was first reported by the Chronicle Tuesday morning, retailers don’t need the authorization if the previous formula-retail tenant did not have it either. The Fillmore Safeway opened 40 years ago, long before such formula-trail restrictions existed, and it is well-known that the neighborhood really wants a grocery store in that location.
“If we want a grocery store to replace a grocery store, we should probably make it easier to open a grocery store,” Sherrill said.
Mahmood’s “Fillmore Safeway” loophole would apply to the whole city, not just that one parcel.
This lifting of formula retail restrictions needs a second reading (probably at next week’s board meeting), and also needs to be signed by the mayor to become law. And if those things happen, boom, the restrictions are lifted.
The Safeway situation is a little more complex. Safeway owns that property, Safeway is selling that property (in hopes of housing being built there), and Safeway is under no obligation to sell it with some grocery store tenants strings attached. And those strings attached could complicate Safeway’s sale.
Mahmood told the Chronicle his office is in negotiations with Safeway to ensure a grocery tenant is included there, and that “the discussions are ongoing.”
Image: Google Street View
