If you told someone five years ago that a 25-story high-rise was coming to the Marina Safeway site, they'd have laughed you out of the room. But here we are — and the proposal is looking increasingly real.

The development would transform one of the Marina's most familiar landmarks into a towering residential behemoth that dwarfs everything around it. Local officials, including the District 2 supervisor and the mayor, have voiced their displeasure. Fists have been shaken. Statements have been issued. But when a coalition called for a Safeway boycott last week, neither joined in. That tells you everything you need to know about how much leverage City Hall actually has here.

And that's the part of this story people need to understand.

This isn't really a story about Safeway being greedy or developers being reckless. It's a story about what happens when Sacramento strips local communities of their zoning authority. Under the state's aggressive housing mandates — laws like SB-423 and the Builder's Remedy — developers can essentially bypass local planning processes if cities haven't met their housing targets. San Francisco, which has spent decades making it nearly impossible to build anything on time or on budget, is now reaping what it sowed.

Is a 25-story tower appropriate for the Marina? Almost certainly not. The neighborhood's low-rise character, infrastructure, and transit access aren't designed for that kind of density. But the city's decades of nimbyism, bureaucratic obstruction, and failure to build housing at any reasonable scale invited exactly this kind of state-level overcorrection.

The result? Communities lose control of their own neighborhoods, elected officials are reduced to performative outrage, and developers hold all the cards.

If San Francisco wants to prevent more of these oversized proposals from steamrolling through, the answer isn't boycotts or press conferences — it's actually building the housing the city committed to in the first place, on terms that make sense for the neighborhoods involved. Until then, expect more 25-story surprises in places nobody imagined them.