By Susan Guerrero : sfgate – excerpt
Town Hall July 23, 2026 on the Towering plans at the Marina Safeway
In the heart of downtown Larkspur, a tiny shopping center has become the grave site of a former Lucky Supermarket. The building, with its barren storefront and sealed doors, has haunted the neighborhood since 2023, yet there are currently no plans to open another grocery store in its place.
Tina McArthur, a Larkspur resident and board president of the historic Lark Theater, blames the building’s owner: Albertsons Companies.
“I think it’s terrible that they just left their building like that,” McArthur said. “The lights are still on. … I really don’t think they care one bit.”
The Lucky store is not an outlier. Albertsons — the parent company of Safeway, Vons and other major supermarkets — owns dozens of vacant surplus properties across the U.S., including at least seven vacant California stores listed for sale. An SFGATE investigation found that Albertsons appears to have a history of using its vast real estate portfolio to block the opening of competing grocers through restrictive land covenants or by keeping its properties vacant. In some cases, Albertsons has introduced controversial development plans on its properties that could raze existing supermarkets like Trader Joe’s in Oakland’s Rockridge neighborhood and Safeway in San Rafael without replacing those markets.
Albertsons could leave even more vacant properties on the market as the grocery company plans to shutter an unknown number of underperforming stores in California, and beyond, after its failed merger with the Kroger Company…
Grocery companies that keep properties vacant or add covenants to prevent future stores contribute to limited food access in communities, according to Christopher Leslie, a law professor at the University of California, Irvine…
The race for housing Albertsons’ impacts on grocery availability in the Bay Area are likely to only increase as the grocery conglomerate flexes its muscle into property development. Align Real Estate and Albertsons are developing housing projects at Safeway locations throughout the Bay Area, including plans to build almost 3,500 units of housing across San Francisco’s Marina, Bernal Heights, Outer Richmond and Fillmore districts. The proposed residential housing project that could demolish the Safeway in San Rafael is not part of the Align Real Estate portfolio and is instead managed by Mill Creek Residential…(more)
Lots to take in here. I can remember hearing about food deserts from Malia Cohen years ago. Now we all are being faced with them.
What do we belive and what can be done to break those covenants? The food deserts are yet another reason to blame Wiener density bills for the loss of grocery stores as grocery chains are playing into his “HOUSING ONLY” zoning directives, except when he needs an exception and then he creates one..