Still No Store on Webster Street. Here’s the New Plan to Change That.

The stick didn’t survive City Hall. Now comes the carrot.

Supervisor Bilal Mahmood has dropped his push to put a vacant-grocery-store tax before voters this November. The measure — the Affordable Groceries Act, which would have taxed big chains sitting on empty storefronts and used the money to subsidize new grocers — didn’t have the votes. Mayor Daniel Lurie’s office opposed it. So did Budget Committee Chair Connie Chan. Mahmood, who says he’s driven by results, read the room and changed the play before the ballot deadline closed the window.

First, clear up what many in the neighborhood still believe: the Safeway was not saved. The city won a reprieve in 2024, and the headlines said so — but the store at 1335 Webster St. closed anyway in February 2025, and it has been dark ever since. Three grocers looked at reopening the space and walked away; the renovation costs didn’t pencil out. The site’s new owner plans a major project — more than 1,800 homes over a ground-floor grocery — but that is years away. A year and a half in, the Fillmore is still shopping somewhere else.

Mahmood’s answer is a three-part package he plans to move through the Board of Supervisors this fall.

First: restore funding for Healthy Retail SF, the program that converts corner stores into outlets selling fresh produce — a lifeline where a corner store is the closest thing to a market.

Second: real money to bring grocers in — fee waivers worth an estimated $50,000 to $80,000 per store, plus capital funding, aimed at underserved neighborhoods.

Third: zoning changes modeled on New York’s FRESH program — density bonuses for housing developments that include a ground-floor grocery, and reforms making it easier to carve up oversized vacant parcels that no single tenant will take.

None of it taxes anyone. All of it needs votes. Every piece is aimed at the same plain truth this neighborhood has lived with since winter of last year: fresh food should not require a bus ride.

The tax fight is over. The grocery fight isn’t. The Board takes it up this fall — and this paper will be at every hearing.