Key facts
- Align Real Estate and Marina Property Owner LLC are named as real parties in interest in the suit.
- The project would replace the Safeway at 15 Marina Blvd. with towers of 22 and 18 stories above a new grocery store.
- The site is zoned for 40 feet; AB 2011 lets qualifying projects on commercial land skip hearings and environmental review.
- The neighbors' only federal claim says the approval shortcut denied them a public hearing, violating due process rights.
- A state toxics official told city planners in December 2025 she did not expect the site to qualify for streamlined approval.
- U.S. District Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín will hear the dismissal motion on February 4, 2027.
Opponents of a plan to build 848 homes above a Safeway grocery store in San Francisco's Marina district have taken their fight to federal court, invoking a Reconstruction-era civil rights law. YesAnd Foundation, Neighborhoods United SF and four residents sued the city on September 11, naming San Francisco, its planning and public health directors and PG&E as defendants. Align Real Estate and Marina Property Owner LLC are listed as real parties in interest.
The project would replace the store at 15 Marina Blvd. and its parking lot with towers of 22 and 18 stories above a new ground-floor grocery. Eighty-six of the homes would be for lower-income households. The site is zoned for 40 feet, but San Francisco declared the project eligible on August 13 for the streamlined review offered by Assembly Bill 2011, a 2022 state law that lets qualifying projects on commercially zoned land skip public hearings and environmental review.
The plaintiffs' only federal claim, filed under Section 1983 of the 1871 law, says the approval shortcut denied them a public hearing and violated their due process rights. Their other six claims arise under California law. In a filing last week, the developer's lawyers at Holland & Knight called the use of the statute "a deeper perversion" of a law meant to protect Black Americans from Ku Klux Klan violence, arguing it should not serve as "a weapon" for one of the city's "most well-resourced communities." The brief cited a 2008 Ninth Circuit ruling that neighbors have no constitutional right to a hearing on someone else's permit.
The plaintiffs also argue environmental risk. The Safeway sits on the site of an old PG&E steam plant next to a former coal-gas plant. A state toxics official told city planners in December 2025 she did not expect the site "to qualify for streamlined approval," citing 2023 petroleum readings 10 times the residential screening level. In 2024 the regional Water Board closed the cleanup of petroleum from the steam plant, finding "no unacceptable public health risks for the current land use," a finding it said rested on the store's commercial use and which it "may reconsider" if that use changes. The complaint says the city approved the project before soil beneath the store was sampled, and that the developer's consultant acknowledged "a data gap" in February because Safeway would not allow drilling while the store operates.
The developer's lawyers say AB 2011 requires cleanup only before the city issues a certificate of occupancy, and they argue the federal court cannot issue the California-style orders the neighbors seek. U.S. District Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín will hear the dismissal motion on February 4, 2027.