Last year, the sole Walgreens in Bayview-Hunters Point shut its doors, leaving the neighborhood’s nearly 35,000 residents without access to a local pharmacy.
Soon, that will change.
After receiving a storefront opportunity grant from San Francisco’s Office of Economic and Workforce Development, “the D10 Community Pharmacy” is now slated to open at 5668 Third St., the former storefront of What’s the Scoop, a long-shuttered ice cream parlor.
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Bayview Senior Services’ Cathy Davis and Geoffrea Morris, who spearheaded Bayview’s D10 Community Market, a free grocery store for low-income residents which opened in 2024 to address food insecurity and lack of available grocery stores in the neighborhood, will lead the effort.
“We have been working tirelessly to bring another pharmacy back to the community and this will be major for the Bayview and District 10 as a whole,” said Supervisor Shamann Walton.
“The senior center, my office, OEWD and the community have reached out to major medical providers, other pharmacies, and even academia to try and bring a pharmacy back into the community, the day we lost the Walgreens in Bayview Plaza and on Williams.”
Residents hoped another pharmacy would open in the place of the now-shuttered Walgreens, and many were dismayed to learn that an Autozone submitted a permit application in February to take its place.
For Dontaye Ball, the president of the Bayview Merchants Association, the news of the opening of the pharmacy, just blocks away from his restaurant, is exciting.
Ball remarked that one of his elderly neighbors began receiving her life-saving medication from a courier ever since the Walgreens, which was located at Bayview Plaza, closed.
“There are often times she needs to leave her house in an emergency vehicle because she can’t get her medication on time,” Ball said. “This is a win for the community, and hopefully this model can be duplicated in other parts of the city that also don’t have access to basic services.”
Walgreens has permanently closed 12 locations across San Francisco as of January of last year, including two locations in Bayview and storefronts in the Western Addition and Ingleside, citing cost-cutting measures. The closures removed access to a local pharmacy for thousands of San Francisco residents, many of whom are low-income.
Correction: A previous version of this article stated that Bayview’s last pharmacy closed in 2019. It closed in 2025.
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