Trump Order Revives Fears of Real Estate Push for San Francisco’s Presidio

President Donald Trump’s executive order targeting San Francisco’s Presidio revived fears that the beloved public land could be eyed for a real estate grab.

It wouldn’t be the first time San Francisco’s bayside was targeted for upscale development — but, much like a failed proposal to build a coastal North Bay city, this project is unlikely to move forward due to legislation protecting the Presidio and the Golden Gate National Recreation Area.

In the 1960s, Pittsburgh real estate developer Thomas Frouge envisioned the Marin Headlands as a bustling oceanside metropolis — 30,000 residents living in apartment towers and single-family homes nestled into the North Bay hillsides, with an upscale hotel and a mile of shopping overlooking San Francisco Bay.

Plans for “Marincello,” as he called it, were greenlit by the Marin County Board of Supervisors but stalled after a six-year legal battle with environmental groups and federal legislation that established and protected the Golden Gate National Recreation Area in 1972.

“The statute was passed in response in part to fears that the Marin Headlands and other beautiful areas would get developed and wanting them to stay as public open space,” Dave Owen, a professor at UC Law San Francisco, said in an interview. “It particularly says … the Secretary [of the Interior] shall preserve the recreation area as far as possible in its natural setting and protect it from development and uses which would destroy the scenic beauty and natural character.”

That statute is embedded in the Presidio Trust Act, which created the federal agency overseeing the national park at San Francisco’s northern tip and sets strict conservation guidelines.

After Trump called for the Presidio Trust to eliminate its non-statutory operations “to the maximum extent consistent with applicable law,” the 1,500-acre park was quickly reconsidered as a potential site for a futuristic city based on a Trump campaign plan. In March 2023, he proposed hosting a competition to create 10 “freedom cities” on federal land that would jumpstart development and be a “quantum leap in the American standard of living.”

Last month, Mark Lutter and Jeffrey Mason of the Charter Cities Institute, an organization that advocates for independent cities with new governance systems, published an article in Palladium magazine calling on the president to start work on the “Presidio Freedom City.”

“President Trump and Congress have the opportunity to turn the 1,500-acre Presidio into a Freedom City and compete with mismanaged San Francisco,” Lutter posted on social media platform X after the order was signed last week.

Venture capitalists and tech entrepreneurs have promoted it as a hub for AI and crypto headquarters, but legislators say the law protecting the space was designed to prevent such an “attack.”

“The [Presidio Trust Act] was written by all of us in a very careful way,” former Rep. Barbara Boxer said Monday on KQED’s Forum. “We understood the jewel that this is, we understood the commercial value of this, and we understood that there might be people now and way into the future that might want to get their hands on it and make it a personal investment instead of a public investment.”

The law passed in 1996 includes two key provisions that make it nearly impossible for Trump — or anyone — to change the park’s footprint without changing the law, according to Owen. One is the inclusion of the Presidio in the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, which stopped the coast of the North Bay from becoming Marincello and “protects the Presidio from development.”

The Presidio Trust Act also has a specific provision that limits the minimal development within the park to the “replacement of existing structures of similar size in existing areas of development.”

“There’s no way that you could reconcile creating Shenzhen, China, with that provision,” Owen told KQED. “You can’t even reconcile that provision with building a new office building in what’s currently a meadow.”

Whether Trump will be able to make any changes to the Trust’s operations remains unclear. The agency first has to submit a report to the Department of Budget and Management detailing its operations and defending its statutory backing in the next two weeks. It has said all its functions are based in the law, and it will continue business as usual.

However, Trump could try to target the seven-member board that oversees the Trust. The president appoints six members, and while the law doesn’t explicitly give the president the power to remove any of the board members before their four-year terms are up, Owen said that so far, the Trump administration’s position has been to act as though it has removal authority of any executive branch official.

Ultimately, though, the courts will decide. Owen said they have not interpreted the Constitution as granting broad removal powers. He added that even if Trump replaced board members, they would still be bound by the Presidio Trust Act.

“The board is still going to have the same statutory mandate, which includes not developing in areas that aren’t already developed and acting in accordance with the mission of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area and its governing law,” he told KQED in an interview. “And so if the proposal is to do things like perhaps change, the amount of revenue brought in from leases or the maintenance schedules for the buildings, yeah, stuff like that can change. But there’s no authority to fundamentally change the way that the Presidio is managed.”