It is fair to say that the Marina District is not the favorite neighborhood of progressive San Francisco. Over the last few decades, it has earned a reputation as being home for affluent Yuppies, and later tech workers, who are out of step with the more avant-garde cultural, and at various times and in various ways, political vibe of parts of San Francisco. Nonetheless, I have always had warm feelings for the Marina. I grew up just on the other side of Lombard Street in Cow Hollow and spent much of my youth hanging out with friends who lived in the Marina.

I have fond memories of the small businesses I used to visit on Chestnut Street, still have a few baseball gloves my mother bought for me at Doherty and Dunne’s sporting goods store on Chestnut Street, made many visits to the hobby and game store on Pierce Street in those pre-video game days, ended more high school nights than I care to remember at Hunts Donuts on Chestnut around Fillmore and spent the summer of 1986 delivering Pizza for Ruby’s Gourmet Pizza, which was then located on Scott between Lombard and Chestnut. I no longer have any friends or family in the Marina District, but I enjoy strolling around the neighborhood occasionally, for predictably Proustian reasons.

When I read about the proposed 800-unit apartment building on the site of the Marina Safeway, my first thought was that the building itself looked kind of cool and I could understand why people who could afford it would want to live there. My second thought was that it would bring a lot more wealthy people into the neighborhood, which given it is the Marina, is no surprise, but would not contribute in any way to making housing in San Francisco more affordable.

District Two, which includes the Marina, is currently represented on the Board of Supervisors by Breed appointee Stephen Sherrill. Before him the district was represented by centrist Democrat Catherine Stefani. In the most recent mayoral election, the Marina gave a plurality of its votes to Mark Farrell, the most conservative candidate in the race who had previously been the district’s supervisor. When San Francisco first adopted district elections for supervisor in 1977, back when I lived in District Two, Dianne Feinstein was elected to represent the community.

Given the neighborhood’s conservative bent relative to other parts of the city and the many youngish tech and finance workers who live there, one would think this would be strong YIMBY territory, and this project is located in the backyard to which Marina YIMBYs allegedly want to say yes. The story appears to be developing somewhat differently. Turns out, as most of us knew all along, that many self-proclaimed YIMBYs feel very confident telling other people what to build in their neighborhoods, but don’t want to build so much in their own.

Mayor Lurie and Supervisor Sherrill, both advocates for Lurie’s (Rich) Family Zoning Plan seem to oppose this development on the kinds of technical grounds that, if articulated by a progressive, would earn scorn from the likes of GrowSF, and possibly a death threat from Garry Tan. 

The most telling comment about this proposal came from Eric Kingsbury, the President of the Marina Community Action Association who, according to the Chronicle, “was endorsed by YIMBY Action when he ran for assembly delegate.” The YIMBY aligned Kingsbury explained his opposition to the development. “One of the nice things about the Marina is it’s low-slung. It’s walkable. It feels like a village separate from the city in many ways. And along comes this behemoth right on the waterfront.”

Kingsbury is not wrong, but his comment could apply to many San Francisco neighborhoods. One could even say that one of the great things about San Francisco is that it can feel like a collection of villages that together form a city that is greater than the sum of its parts. Lurie’s (Rich) Family Zoning Plan, and the YIMBY program more broadly, is an effort not to destroy the Marina specifically, but to destroy the feel of many of San Francisco’s neighborhoods to create housing for the wealthy and profits for the real estate developers.

The proposed development on the site of the Marina Safeway, which apparently would be closed for some time during construction and then reopened, is just one project. It is unlikely to be built for a number of reasons both political and economic. However, it reveals some deeper things about the housing discussion in San Francisco. 

First, this is not about affordability. Even 800 units on the eastern fringe of the Marina District is not going to work some kind of trickle-down YIMBY magic and create 800 affordable units of housing somewhere else in the city. Second, all neighborhoods, even, perhaps particularly, less progressive ones want to maintain the neighborhood vibe that so many of us love about San Francisco. Third, while it is tough to pronounce, YIYBY is a better acronym for YIMBY, because at the end of the day the backyard in which so many of these YIMBYs want to see things built are not their own, but yours.