How the Marina Safeway Will Change Fort Mason

San Francisco is lumbering toward building more housing.

Of all the proposed developments, the set of Safeway conversions seems to be the most contentious. Albertsons, Safeway’s parent company, has been working with real estate developer Align Real Estate to turn four San Francisco Safeway sites into mixed-use retail and housing. Its current plans, as of July 2026¹, are:

• Marina, 15 Marina Boulevard: 848 homes, including 86 affordable units, above a new 67,000-square-foot Safeway; two towers topping out at 22 and 18 stories.
• Outer Richmond, 850 La Playa Street: 562 homes, including 112 affordable units, above a new 63,000-square-foot Safeway in an eight-story building.
• Bernal Heights, 3350 Mission Street: 379 homes, including 76 affordable units, above a new 55,000-square-foot Safeway in a six-story building.
• Fillmore, 1335 Webster Street: roughly 1,800 homes across four buildings, with about 15 percent affordable, a 20,000-square-foot replacement grocery store, and towers up to 30 stories.

And of all developments across the city, at least among people I know, the Marina Safeway conversion is the most bitterly contested.

The most acute objection seems to be the impact on Fort Mason; none of the other Safeway developments are next to a public park. When I was there a few months ago, I was petitioned by a volunteer to oppose the new development. The ask was to block a monstrosity coming into the neighborhood, but the pitch wasn’t particularly compelling. They didn’t even include any renderings of the new build.

Despite the conversation around it, pro or con, no one has ever shown me a simulation of how the views from Fort Mason will actually be affected - or how far the shadow of the new build will cast onto the park. There's obviously a camp of people who don't care, that building housing is worth it regardless of the impacts, but I still think it's worth educating the public about tradeoffs in public space.

The Cow Hollow Association seems to be the main neighborhood group objecting to the development because of the views. Before the July revision increased the project to 848 units while shortening the towers, the association website offered some general objections:

This project proposes 20 and 25 story towers on a liquefaction zone with known toxic conditions. It is wildly out of scale, largely luxury units, and would bring major impacts, including shadows over Fort Mason, strained infrastructure, traffic congestion, and just 197 parking spaces for 790 units.

They link to a crude 3D map of the Marina upzoning, but that map uses older zoning specifications and doesn’t include the current Safeway proposal.

Here's their rendering of what that version of the new build would look like:

As near as I can tell, this render was financed by the neighborhood association. I haven't seen this image in any of the official city filing documents. And it looks damn near vibe ruining, at least as Fort Mason is concerned. I certainly don't want to spend my park afternoons sitting in one big shadow.

Of course, they’re trying to galvanize opposition to the property, so I suspected this was a worst-case rendering of the impacts. It’s also worth noting that most people don’t spend any time in this particular area of the park:

I occasionally see dogs running here, or bikers cutting through as they head to the main road. That’s about it.

The center part, in the middle of the walking oval with the palm trees, is where people spend the majority of their time. That’s the iconic Fort Mason. So! Nothing to worry about, right? It's a bunch of NIMBY's overreacting? Time to move on with our lives?

Before agents, the answer was most certainly yes. But since I had a Saturday morning free and some tokens to burn, I thought we could do better.

This is a blocky simulation of each building of the neighborhood, based on publicly available height records of the current builds. The toggle lets you see how light changes before and after the introduction of the new Safeway. The Safeway design itself is based on diagrams filed with the city; I followed them as closely as possible, including the slanted design of the front of the property and the height difference of the two towers. If you click in the upper right, you can see the references and renderings included with the proposal.

I did a similar analysis when I moved into my current apartment, to see when in the year we might be in shadow from some high-rises down the street. It turns out that simulating shadows is pretty simple: you just have to determine the angle and direction of the sun, combine that with a topographic map of the area (both of which being freely available), and you’re off to the races. But I didn't even need to port any of that code into this new project; a good enough prompt and critiques of the first few drafts was enough to land at this place.

My conclusion:

• In the seasonal summer,² all is normal because the angle of the sun pushes the shadow south of Fort Mason and across Bay Street. This holds through the late afternoon and sunset.
• In the winter, the sun is angled more directly west past the new Safeway build, so the shadows start affecting the park about an hour and a half before sunset.

Fall and spring are somewhere in the middle as the sun sweeps across the sky. Not all bad, not all good.

Frankly, I’m pretty baffled by the discourse around this development. It seems to be a very vibe-heavy conversation, with supporters of more housing at all costs pitted against the no-buildings-above-five-stories types. You’re welcome to draw your own conclusions.

And with technology where it is, you can draw your own conclusions. And you can in under an hour³. Part of what I love so much about software is the ability to quantify the previously qualitative. And agentic development makes that practical for regular people, not just geospatial nerds. If you're pitching a new building or trying to fight against it, you shouldn't be leaving things up to vibes. Vibe coding yes, public policy vibes no.

Footnotes

1. The Marina proposal was revised this month so consider these a snapshot. Plans are still subject to change. ↩

2. San Francisco’s actual summer, with blue skies and high temperatures, usually comes later in the year, toward September or October. August is known as Fogust for a reason. ↩

3. Writing this post took dramatically longer than making the tool. ↩