Onetime SF supervisor and Black community leader the Reverend Amos Brown is gunning for Safeway following the announcement of its planned closure date in the Fillmore, and its plans to sell its land there for an enormous profit.

"It’s almost Christmas, and Safeway ads are full of joyful images of happy people buying food for their holiday meals," writes Brown in a Chronicle op-ed. "But in the Fillmore, Safeway has a much different message for the San Francisco neighborhood’s Black community: We don’t care about you. Goodbye, and good luck finding groceries where you live."

Brown is one of a number of community leaders in the Fillmore who are angry that Safeway, albeit a year delayed, is planning to leave the neighborhood without a full-service grocery store, possibly for five years or more, until a still-undisclosed development plan for the property might include another grocery store, once it's complete.

Safeway has announced that the closure at 1335 Webster Street will take place February 7, 13 months after it first announced it would close. The initial January 2024 announcement, which came seemingly out of the blue, said the store would close just two months later. Under pressure from the city and the community, the company said it would delay the closure "to provide a greater transition period for the community."

While no development plan has been submitted to the city, and we do not know the status of the deal to sell the property to Align Real Estate, it has been estimated that the 3.7-acre property could accommodate around 1,000 residential units.

Brown makes a valid point in his op-ed: In the interest of corporate profits alone, Safeway is off-loading this property, which it bought for a song in the 1970s thanks to San Francisco's controversial redevelopment project that destroyed the fabric of this once vibrant Black neighborhood, dubbed the Harlem of the West.

The land was taken a decade earlier from Black families by eminent domain, which makes Safeway's profiting from it all that much bitterer of a pill to swallow.

"This is corporate arrogance of the highest order, especially for a company that professes on its website that is 'committed to helping people across the country live better lives by making a meaningful difference, neighborhood by neighborhood,'" Reverend Brown writes.

Brown further suggests that, given that Safeway "has never... had the courtesy to meet with the" community about this closure, the city should "step in and prevent the closure and sale and bring Safeway to the table to give the community a voice in what happens next."

Supervisor Dean Preston, whose term on the board ends next month, wrote a letter to Mayor London Breed in November suggesting that eminent domain should be on the table once more — given the community benefit of having a grocery store in this location. The mayor has not responded, but the newly composed Board of Supervisors may be wary of thwarting a development that could help the city reach its housing goals.

Previously: Dean Preston Makes End Run to Thwart Fillmore Safeway Development Plan