Westlake's Saturday Hasn't Changed in Decades. Its Parking Lot Just Did.

Saturday morning in Daly City still starts the way it has for longer than most residents have lived here. The market opens at nine at Serramonte Center, folding tables filling in behind Macy's the way they have every Thursday and Saturday since 1991, which makes this year the market's 35th season. A few miles north on John Daly Boulevard, though, Saturday looks different than it did even a year ago. A construction fence now runs along Southgate Avenue where a vacant Burlington Coat Factory building used to sit, and behind it a crew has been doing something that hasn't happened at Westlake Shopping Center in more than fifteen years: building new housing.

The two centers sit close enough that plenty of residents hit both in the same afternoon, but they're running on different clocks. Serramonte's market has barely changed its rhythm in three and a half decades. Westlake, by contrast, is in the middle of only its second real housing push since developer Henry Doelger broke ground on the original 40-acre shopping center back in 1948. Watching both in the same weekend is a good way to understand how Daly City actually changes: not all at once, and not evenly, but block by block, on its own schedule.

A Market Older Than Most of the Storefronts Around It

The Daly City Certified Farmers Market runs year round at 133 Serramonte Center, Thursdays and Saturdays from 9am to 1pm, and it accepts CalFresh and WIC benefits alongside cash and cards. It has stayed in the same parking lot behind Macy's through every remodel the surrounding mall has gone through. The city's own planning documents note that Serramonte Center has had a face-lift with interior improvements over the years, while Westlake underwent a full redesign and built a new pedestrian mall. The market itself never had to move for any of it. That kind of stability is easy to take for granted until you compare it to what's happening a few exits away.

Westlake's Second Act in Fifteen Years

Westlake Shopping Center is one of the earliest planned shopping centers built in the country, and the neighborhood around it grew out from the mall rather than the other way around. Doelger bought roughly 1,350 acres of former hog and cabbage farmland in San Mateo County in 1945 and spent the next two decades building out the Westlake tract, with the 40-acre commercial core at its center. Kimco Realty has owned the center since 2002, and it's anchored today by Home Depot, Trader Joe's, Ross Dress for Less, Safeway, Target and Walgreens, along with more than 25 dining options.

For most of Kimco's ownership, the center's footprint stayed put. The first real attempt to add housing came in 2017, when the city approved a 179-unit building at 10 Park Plaza Drive. The bigger swing came later: in July 2022, the Daly City Planning Commission gave preliminary approval to a much larger project, a seven-story, 214-unit building at 99 Southgate Avenue that would require demolishing the long-vacant Burlington Coat Factory store. That building, now under construction as The Chester at Westlake, broke ground in September 2025 as a partnership between Kimco and Bozzuto, and it's slated to open in winter 2027. The finished project will carry 13,000 square feet of shared amenities, including two courtyards, a fitness center, co-working space and a rooftop lounge, and it's targeting LEED Gold certification.

Eight years separate the first approval from the second groundbreaking, and the unit count moved from 179 to 214 in that span. That's not a fast pace by most standards, but it's the fastest Westlake has moved on housing in its 75-plus year history. Bozzuto's Devon Hastie framed the timing around strong demand for market-rate housing in the area paired with what he called "very limited new supply." The Chester will be Daly City's first major predominantly market-rate apartment community in more than fifteen years, which tells you as much about how little has been built here recently as it does about what's coming.

The Restaurant That Never Left the Block

Not everything at Westlake has taken the demolish-and-rebuild route. At 11 Glenwood Avenue, inside a building Doelger himself designed, Original Joe's Westlake has been serving the same kind of unpretentious Italian-American food since the location first opened as Joe's of Westlake in 1956. It closed in 2014 after Bruno Scatena's daughter Melinda sold the restaurant, and it sat dark for two years before the Duggan family, who own Original Joe's in San Francisco's North Beach, bought and fully remodeled it. It reopened in February 2016 with the same 10,000-square-foot floor plan and roughly 300 seats, and it's still the anchor most residents point to when they want a sit-down table on a Saturday.

Original Joe's Westlake is currently open Monday through Thursday from 11am to 10pm, Friday until 11pm, and weekends from 10am, with a weekend brunch service running 10am to 2pm. It's a useful contrast to what's happening a block away. The Chester required tearing down a vacant retail box that had already lost its tenant. Original Joe's took the opposite path: same building, same footprint, same family recipes, just a full interior remodel behind the original walls. Westlake isn't choosing one model of change over the other. It's running both at once.

The One Stretch of the Route No Planning Commission Can Touch

If the Saturday errands end early enough, the drive out to Mussel Rock Park is worth the detour before the fog rolls back in. The parking area sits at the end of Westline Drive near the Pacifica border, and the main loop, Mussel Rock Trail, covers 1.9 miles with about 269 feet of elevation gain, an easy 50-minute walk with dogs welcome on leash. The park is one of the more reliable paragliding and hang gliding launch points on this stretch of coast, and it's also a solid spot for whale and seal sightings depending on the season. A rock arch just offshore, accessible at low tide, is one of the park's better-known landmarks, part of what the Golden Gate National Recreation Area lists among its features. For a longer walk, the Bay Area Ridge Trail's Mussel Rock to Lake Merced segment continues north along residential streets before ending at the lake, with restrooms available there.

Nothing about this stretch of coastline is up for a planning commission vote. Erosion moves the cliff edge a little more every winter, no matter what Kimco or the city decides to build a few miles inland. It's a good place to end a Saturday that started with a market older than most of the storefronts around it and ran through a shopping center in the middle of rebuilding a piece of itself for only the second time this century.

That's the actual shape of change in this neighborhood. It doesn't arrive all at once, and it doesn't arrive evenly. It shows up as a new building where an old one sat empty, a restaurant that came back inside its original walls, and a market that never had to move at all. If you're a homeowner here and you're curious what any of this, the new construction at Westlake especially, might mean for your own property or your timeline, Sandra Darrow is always glad to talk it through. No pressure, just a straight conversation about what's changing in your corner of Daly City and what it's worth to you.