Almost exactly 40 years after former Mayor Dianne Feinstein, in a message that sounds almost Trump-like today, vetoed a bill that would have required community notice before a large company closed a major supermarket, the Board of Supes has approved similar legislation—and this time, I don’t think the mayor can veto it.
The bill, by Sup. Dean Preston, would mandate six month’s notice before a full-service grocery store closes, and requires a process to guarantee community members a chance to find another story to take over the space.
Preston’s supermarket bill has much larger political implications.
From Preston:
For far too long, decisions affecting our neighborhood grocery stores were made by corporate elites behind closed doors. But no longer,” said Supervisor Preston. “With the Grocery Protection Act, our communities will finally have a say. When a major grocery store closes, we’ll now have a six-month warning, a public meeting where people’s voices will be heard, and time to create a plan that prioritizes neighborhood needs over profits. This victory belongs to everyone who fought alongside us, proving that San Francisco is a city for the people, not just the powerful.
Safeway, which was once family owned (the heir and former CEO, Peter Magowan, in 1993 led the consortium of local investors who bought the Giants and kept the team in San Francisco; he later took over Giants management).
Since 2015, the company has been owned by a venture capital firm that’s based in New York City and wants to sell the site of its Western Addition store. That site is part of a redevelopment area, which means that Safeway got the land at a fraction of its actual value after hundreds of Black-owned homes and businesses were demolished in the 1960s in the name of “urban renewal.”
So as a short-term, quick money asset, the land is far more valuable to a VC firm than the supermarket ever will be. A developer who wants to build market-rate housing will probably offer the highest price, meaning land that was once housing for working Black families could become high-end condos for rich people, thanks to redevelopment and venture capital.
Preston’s ordinance will at least slow the process down, and give the neighborhood and the city the chance to offer alternatives. (The city, of course, could by the land and use if for affordable housing with a supermarket on the ground floor.)
It’s interesting to look at this in the context of political history.
Sup. Nancy Walker introduced the original bill in 1983. I was a young reporter at the Bay Guardian, and my colleague Frank Clancy referred to it as the “Safeway preservation ordinance.” It passed in 1984.
But Feinstein, in a veto message, said:
I find this legislation to be an unnecessary intrusion of governmental regulatory authority. I recognize that it purports to help people maintain service in their community, but I believe it would have an adverse impact in “pushing the camel’s nose under the tent,” with further legislation in other areas.
It’s remarkable in retrospect just how conservative Feinstein was as mayor. She opposed the bill because it could have set a precedent for other regulations on business closures—say, of banks or hospitals. And back then, the Chamber of Commerce and the business community opposed pretty much all regulations.
These days, the idea of regulations on some business activities, particularly in the land use and development area, is pretty well established and expected. The supes just passed a bill by Sup. Aaron Peskin that limits the ability of speculators to evict legacy businesses in commercial corridors. Limits on chain stores in neighborhoods have been in place for many years.
Breed can’t veto the Preston bill; it passed unanimously.
But now the tech industry, which is playing a huge role in the fall elections, has taken over the Feinstein/Chamber of Commerce narrative, and is working to prevent regulations of any sort on its existing and emerging businesses. That’s one of the deep underlying issues in the mayor’s race and in the supervisor races: I don’t think the billionaires who are opposing Preston care much one way or another about a Safeway in the Western Addition—but they care a lot about regulations on self-driving cars, on drones, on robot delivery vehicles, on AI, and on whatever they next come up with to test on the people of San Francisco.
The Tech Lords see Preston’s policies as the camel’s nose in the tent. That’s why they want so badly to get rid of him.
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