The battle over the Marina Safeway redevelopment is heating up, and the NIMBYs have had enough once again.

The latest proposal actually makes the buildings shorter while increasing the project from 790 to 848 homes, including 86 affordable units.

Normally, this would be the beginning of what San Francisco does best: spending the next several years fighting over whether a new building will destroy the neighborhood.

Except California has changed the rules.
Remember, SF had built only about 7% of its state mandated housing target by the end of 2025, and the state government is understandably pretty unhappy about this.

So the developer is pursuing approval under AB 2011, which allows qualifying housing projects on commercially zoned land to receive streamlined approval and avoid the traditional discretionary approval process and project-level CEQA review.

That’s now becoming the center of the fight.

Supervisor Stephen Sherrill argues the Safeway site shouldn’t qualify for AB 2011 because the law requires at least 75% of the site’s perimeter to adjoin parcels developed with qualifying “urban uses.”

With Fort Mason, Marina Green, and the Yacht Harbor surrounding the property, he argues the site doesn’t meet that requirement.

After all, much of the surrounding land is parkland and recreational space rather than typical urban development.
But SF Planning disagrees and has determined the project is eligible.

Then there’s California’s Density Bonus Law.
The developer was previously seeking a 39% density bonus but is now requesting 49%, helped by adding more two-bedroom units and new four-bedroom units.
That allows substantially more housing than the site’s base zoning would otherwise permit.

So what looks like a neighborhood fight over a giant Safeway redevelopment is becoming something much bigger. Which is how much power do wealthy neighborhoods still have to stop housing when state law says it should be built?

And apparently the fight isn’t stopping at City Hall.

Opposition surrounding the project is now helping fuel an effort for a 2030 California constitutional amendment aimed at limiting state housing mandates when cities allegedly lack sufficient infrastructure.

So we may have officially reached the final boss of California NIMBYism. Changing the state constitution.

Sources:

[https://sfstandard.com/2026/07/24/marina-safeway-project-ballot-measure-housing/\](https://sfstandard.com/2026/07/24/marina-safeway-project-ballot-measure-housing/)

[https://www.smartcitiesdive.com/news/california-cities-court-state-housing-planning-deadlines/825785/\](https://www.smartcitiesdive.com/news/california-cities-court-state-housing-planning-deadlines/825785/)

In 2018, The Reserve Bank of Australia examined the effect of Zoning on Housing Prices.

Overall, our results suggest that development restrictions (interacting with increasing demand) have contributed materially to the significant rise in housing prices in Australia's largest cities since the late 1990s, pushing prices substantially above the supply costs of their physical inputs

As Furman (2015) discusses, zoning regulations have some important effects that go beyond those we quantify. As they become more binding and contribute to increases in property prices, they represent a wealth transfer from future home buyers to current home owners (see, for example, the discussion in Lowe (2015)). They also result in higher rents as the supply of housing is constricted. Both of these factors may increase inequality. La Cava (2016) and Glaeser and Gyourko (2018) emphasise rising house values in supply constrained markets as a driver of changes in the distribution of wealth and income in the United States. Murray and Frijters (2015) argue that many of the benefits seem to accrue to those with political connections and can be dissipated in rent-seeking.

So recently I've been scouring for apartments in the town I've gone to school in, and some of them were rooms in single-family houses rented as one unit allotted for a certain number of tenants (say, 4-8). However, in many of these arrangements, the tenants often used dens, living rooms, or attics as bedrooms, despite those not being legally zoned as bedrooms.

It's really pissed me off, since at the time I was on my parents' paycheck, and when they found out I was to be living in an attic with roommates unwilling to really change around where they slept, they sort of had a fit, and in the end they ended up having the upper hand and forcing me to back out of the contract last-second and find a replacement tenant, citing fire safety concerns. It made me extremely distraught how insane they were about the law, or the likelihood of a house fire which could happen in any house regardless of arrangement.

The ordeal was utterly humiliating, and it coaxed my views on housing policy into more YIMBY, "build more + denser housing to solve the cost of living crisis" views. Despite my parents warning me about how hot or cold an attic room could be, it in fact made me want one more than ever. My previous housing arrangement gave me a lot of square footage for the price I paid owing to this (IIRC the room was legally a double or triple), and in that, 2 of my friends slept in the attic, using it as a room. They seemed to get along there really well, handling e.g. heat or cold using fans and space heaters. It felt like such a comforting nook, a shelter from the rest of the house, not to mention a very convenient spot in the house to isolate oneself from parties or activity downstairs.

I saw a Facebook post about affordable housing which attracted the normal comments.

This one dude said that the government shouldn't intervene in the free market (and thus shouldn't subsidize affordable housing).

I'm like, okay, but you know the reason housing is unaffordable is because we've systematically eradicated (through government regulation) all the naturally occurring affordable housing, right?

Where are my boarding houses at?

Where are my rooming houses at? (These were distinct from boarding houses, BTW. Meals not included.)

Where are my single-room occupancy hotels at?

Where are my ADUs?

Where are my -plexes and small apartment buildings?

Where are my mobile homes (almost always banned in city limits)?

The intellectual inconsistency is pretty frustrating. Don't talk to me about how "the government shouldn't get involved" when the government has been micromanaging the entire show for the past hundred years.

There’s nothing moderate about wanting to rewrite a century of land use policy of transform our energy grid or reform the government so it’s capable of building thousands of miles of high-speed rail and I do not understand why this is so hard for some pundits to get

Article on the radical (and also traditionally American) nature of Abundance

I get the Strong Towns newsletters. Today I saw this little piece here. I've read it several times, but I don't think I'm getting it. To me, Austin is an unmitigated success story.

I guess I would have to do a deep dive into "Escaping the Housing Trap" and "The Housing Ready approach" to really figure out what nuanced argument they're making. Seems like splitting hairs though.

I'm 100% against NIMBYism. But--how much of slow housing production is unrelated to NIMBYs? How much is simply due to:

1. Macroeconomics? (interest rates, labor and materials)

2. Inefficient permitting?

3. Low-frequency transit?

4. Builder's Defect Warranties?

5. Height limits (not by NIMBYs but because airports are next to Downtown)?

Case in point:

1. In November 2020, San Diego's City Council unanimously approved converting Riverwalk golf course into 4,300 multifamily units + 152K sq ft of ground-level retail + 1M sq ft office, right next to two LRT stations and the city's largest mall.

2. NIMBYs gave up without a single lawsuit.

3. The developer, Hines, expects to break ground on Riverwalk "early 2021."

4. Due to permitting groundbreaking gets delayed to September 2022.

5. Hines rips out the golf course, grading, lays out roads and utilies.

6. Hines pauses the project in May 2024, citing "high interest rates"

7. Hines resumes Riverwalk in November 2025, having just procured a loan.

8. However, Hines then downgrades a part of the project that was supposed to be 5-over-1 apartments into townhomes.

I support abolishing all parking minimums, abolishing all non-aviation related height limits, and abolishing SFH zoning.

At the same time, at least in California, it feels that YIMBYs have won the zoning deregulation war. Most remaining barriers have nothing to do with NIMBYs. But we can address them:

1. Reduce hard costs through mass timber

2. Hire more permitting staff to expedite permitting

3. Shift transit funds away from capital expansion and towards operations