In the waning days of his time on the Board of Supervisors, Supervisor Dean Preston made a final effort Tuesday to stop a plan to redevelop the Fillmore Safeway property and to make sure it becomes affordable housing.

A controversial plan is moving forward to close the Fillmore District Safeway at Geary and Webster streets early next year to make way for a massive new development -- the timeline and total scope of which has never been publicized. Including its parking lot, the site is 3.68 acres, and it's zoned for up to 130 feet in height. With the state's density-bonus program -- which would require a percentage of the units be made affordable -- that could mean this development will reach almost 200 feet or around 20 stories, and could include well over 1,000 units of housing.

On Tuesday, as the Chronicle reports, Dean Preston sent a letter of inquiry to Mayor London Breed requesting that she explore all options for making sure that the property be used for 100% affordable housing, including using eminent domain. The use of emninent doman would require the city to pay the property owner a fair market price for the land, which could then be used by the city for a valid public use -- and an attorney confirms to the Chronicle that affordable housing would count as such a use.

It seems unlikely that the mayor's office, or Preston, will be able to this done in a hurry, before a new mayor, Daniel Lurie, and Preston's replacement as District 5 supervisor, Bilal Mahmood, are sworn in, in January. And that would assume the mayor has an interest in thwarting this development deal in her waning days in office.

Approving such a move would also require a super-majority vote by the Board of Supervisors, which also seems unlikely.

"Such a development would be unaffordable to nearly all residents of the neighborhood, and could compound years of gentrification and displacement," Preston said in the letter, per the Chronicle.

Preston is referring to the fact that the Fillmore, infamously, was the subject of a much-cited blunder by the city and its former Redevelopment Agency, which broadly declared the Black-majority neighborhood "blighted" in the 1960s, paving the way for the use of eminent domain and the demolition of hundreds of homes. This displaced thousands of Black residents from the area, and the city proceeded to take decades to build back the housing units that were lost.

This Safeway's construction was part of that redevelopment process, and it has become the main grocery store of the surrounding area. The Chronicle notes that Safeway bought the property from the Redevelopment Agency for $1.5 million in the 1980s. They likely are selling it for many millions more.

Preston's letter to Breed may have been spurred by a community meeting that is happening this week, on Thursday, to discuss the store's planned closure. No closing date has been announced, although the store had floated January 2025 as the timeframe when it announced it would delay closure -- the store first announced in January 2024 that it would be closing three months later, which was met with uproar, and Preston said at the time that he was blindsided by the news and the development plan.

Safeway would need to provide a layoff notice to the state 60 days before a planned closure, which apparently has not happened yet. But the Wells Fargo branch inside the store already closed two weeks ago.

The Fillmore United Alliance is meeting Thursday, and a rep for the group, Erris Edgerly, tells the Chronicle that they want to push Safeway to stay open longer, given the importance of the store in the neighborhood.

"If Safeway wants to pull out, let us at least find some type of way of keeping the grocery store open until there's a development agreement, and from there, let us have talks about what we want to see [built on the site]."

It may be telling that Align Real Estate has been so tight-lipped about its developmenet plans, since such a huge development, no matter what it looks like, is likely to draw some controversy. And given that there has been no design review or public presentation of the development plans, or any permitting that we're aware of, it seems likely that any demolition on the site isn't happening for another year or more.

In response to Preston's letter, the mayor's office only told the Chronicle that they hadn't seen it, and "Supervisor Preston has yet to engage our office or the department to raise this issue or provide additional information."

A rep for incoming Mayor Daniel Lurie did not weigh in on the eminent domain idea, only saying, "The mayor-elect will be handling the historic challenges and decisions it [sic] needs to make upon assumption of office and is currently focused on building an administration rooted in accountability, service and change."