Walk the north side of Anza Vista on any given Tuesday and you pass the same tableau you've passed for the better part of a decade: the Target at City Center doing brisk business, the parking structure filling up, and then, thirty feet away, a dark storefront with a For Lease sign that has been there so long it's practically a landmark. That space used to be a Best Buy. Before that, briefly, it was supposed to be a Whole Foods. For nearly nine years it has been neither, a 50,000-square-foot gap in the middle of the neighborhood's only real shopping center.
That gap is about to close, and it isn't closing quietly. At the same time, across Divisadero from the Kaiser Permanente hospital that has anchored the eastern edge of Anza Vista for generations, plans are moving for the first genuinely new hospital building the health system has proposed in San Francisco in more than seventy years. The two fixed points in daily life here, where you shop and what's across the street, are both changing on roughly the same timeline. Neither one has moved this fast before.
The Best Buy Box Finally Has A Tenant
The short version: T&T Supermarket, the largest Asian grocery retailer in Canada, is taking over 2675 Geary Boulevard, the exact address Best Buy vacated in September 2017. T&T confirmed the lease last year and has said the store is slated to open by the end of 2026. A job fair for the location already happened on site, February 27, 2026, at City Center, and the company described it as one of the largest recruiting pushes it has done ahead of any store opening.
What's coming isn't a straight swap of one big-box tenant for another. T&T's own materials describe a store built around a working bakery with more than 150 bread varieties, a fast-casual counter serving Peking duck and sushi, and more than 200 private-label grocery items alongside dumplings, kalbi marinade, and green onion pancakes. CEO Tina Lee has said she expects the store to become a regular lunch stop for people working at the Kaiser medical center and students from the University of San Francisco, both of which sit within a few blocks.
That's a specific claim worth sitting with. The space has been empty long enough that most people in the neighborhood stopped expecting anything to happen with it. Whole Foods announced plans to take the same square footage not long after Best Buy left, and those plans went quiet for years before reporting confirmed they were no longer active. City Center's landlord, Acadia Realty Trust, has now backed a very different kind of anchor, one built around fresh food and prepared meals rather than electronics or a national grocery chain's standard format. It also happens to be arriving less than a mile from the Fillmore Street Safeway that closed despite neighborhood objections, which means the calculus around where to buy groceries on this stretch of the city is shifting in more than one direction at once.
Across The Street, A Different Kind Of Change
The Kaiser Permanente medical center at 2425 Geary Boulevard has been part of the neighborhood's identity for so long that most residents don't think of it as changeable. It is. Reporting from April 2026 lays out Kaiser's plan for a roughly 623,000-square-foot hospital with 300 private beds, to be built across the street at Geary and Divisadero. The current facility runs about 367,000 square feet with 239 semi-private beds. If the plan goes forward as proposed, it would be Kaiser's first new hospital building in San Francisco in more than seven decades.
The mechanics matter here more than the headline number. The existing hospital would keep operating throughout construction, and once the new building opens, the current one would convert to medical office space rather than close outright. Kaiser's other San Francisco locations, in Mission Bay and the Inner Richmond, aren't part of this plan at all. The timeline on record points to the new hospital rising by 2033, which is a long runway, but the fact that the project has moved from rumor to a reported, scaled proposal is itself the news. This is a health system that has operated out of the same footprint on Geary for decades quietly signaling it's ready to double its bed count and build new.
Why This Particular Corner Moves So Slowly
None of this reads as remarkable unless you know how this stretch of Geary usually behaves. City Center itself has a documented history of proposals that stall. The complex was built for Sears back in 1961 and has gone through redevelopment attempts in fits and starts ever since, plans for tens of thousands of additional square feet of retail drawn up, debated, and only partially realized over the years. One recent piece of local reporting on the broader Geary corridor's development politics called City Center "an unpleasant concrete jumble" without "the destination charm" of Japantown or Stonestown, and noted that Geary has functioned as something of an afterthought in the city's planning conversations for decades even as officials acknowledge it holds some of the best remaining room for gradual growth in San Francisco.
That's the pattern this year is breaking. A retail tenant that actually opens instead of falling through. A hospital system floating its biggest local expansion in a lifetime instead of quietly maintaining what it has. Both of these are happening on the same two blocks, within the same twelve-month window, after years where the safest bet on this corner was that nothing much would change.
What Actually Shifts For People Who Live Here
If you already live in Anza Vista, the practical version of this is simple. Sometime before the end of 2026, the errand run to City Center stops being just Target and starts including a full grocery and prepared-food stop that residents haven't had inside the neighborhood itself. The walk past that dark storefront, the one that's been dark long enough to feel permanent, ends. And the block you pass on the way to or from Kaiser, the one that's looked the same for as long as most residents have lived here, has a real proposal attached to it now, even if the building itself is years from breaking ground.
None of this changes what makes the neighborhood work day to day. The 43-Masonic still runs the same route. Alamo Square is still a few blocks southeast. The mix of postwar duplexes and the occasional Edwardian on the eastern blocks isn't going anywhere. What's changing is narrower and more concrete: two of the fixed, unchanging landmarks that residents have organized their errands and expectations around for the better part of a decade are both, finally, in motion.
If you're weighing what any of this means for a home you already own here, or you're curious how a market largely defined by "quiet and unchanging" tends to respond when two of its biggest anchors move at once, that's a conversation worth having with someone who tracks this stretch of the city closely. Domain SF Marin works both sides of the Golden Gate and can walk you through what's actually happening on your block, not just what a listing algorithm assumes about the neighborhood. Let's meet. Request a personalized home valuation whenever you're ready to talk specifics.