Edward Henderson | California Black Media
The Safeway at 1335 Webster Street has been dark since February 2025. Eighteen months later, the Fillmore still has no full-service grocery store — and no agreement on how to get one.
Three grocers looked at the site and walked away. Grocery Outlet proposed a scaled-down temporary store in January 2025, offering $400,000 a year in rent. By April, the deal was dead. Smart & Final explored a temporary lease and declined. Sprouts kicked the tires and moved on.
The problem, according to reporting by the San Francisco Standard, was money. Getting the building running again would cost $2 million to $4 million — numbers that don’t work for an operator planning to stay two or three years. Safeway removed the freezers before it left, which didn’t help.
Supervisor Bilal Mahmood says the problem is Safeway itself. He contends the company obstructed negotiations with replacement grocers, and he wants the city to do something about it: a ballot measure that would tax vacant grocery stores and use the money to subsidize new operators. Mayor Daniel Lurie opposes new taxes, arguing they make it harder to open grocery stores, not easier.
Align Real Estate, which bought the property, plans a mixed-use development with more than 1,800 housing units and a ground-floor grocery.
