Construction has officially started on the first new mixed-use apartment community to rise in Daly City in fifteen years. Chester at Westlake will become a seven-story residential complex with over two hundred homes at 99 Southgate Avenue, overlooking the popular Westlake Shopping Center. Kimco Realty and Bozzuto have partnered together as joint developers.
With construction now underway, the development team is celebrating the first predominantly market-rate apartment community to break ground in Daly City in fifteen years. Bozzuto will be the lead developer for The Chester, with Kimco involved for retail. Kimco has owned and operated Westlake Shopping Center since 2002. President and CEO Toby Bozzuto said, “We are honored to partner again with Kimco on The Chester at Westlake, Bozzuto’s first ground-up development on the West Coast.” J.P. Morgan is supporting the project by providing construction financing.
The Chester at Westgate sit map, illustration via the 2022-approved plan set
Kimco CEO Conor Flynn provided the following statement from a press release, saying, “Westlake has always been at the heart of Daly City, and with The Chester, we are writing its next chapter… This project reflects our strategy of transforming high-quality retail destinations into thriving mixed-use communities that bring new housing, amenities, and energy to one of the Bay Area’s most established neighborhoods.”
The roughly 85-foot-tall structure will yield over 350,000 square feet, with roughly 250,000 square feet for housing, 10,000 square feet of ground-level retail, and less than 100,000 square feet for parking. The complex will add 214 apartments above a two-story concrete podium garage, with capacity for 288 cars.
The Chester will feature studios, one-bedrooms, two-bedrooms, and three-bedrooms, more than two-thirds of which will include a private balcony or terrace. Residential amenities will include a fitness center, yoga room, co-working space, a communal bar, two landscaped courtyards, and a rooftop sky lounge.
BDE Architecture is responsible for the design. Illustrations depict a contemporary podium-style apartment building with facade articulation and material variation, visually breaking up the overall massing. The exterior will be clad with fiber cement panels, siding, board-formed concrete, and stucco.
99 Southgate Avenue, image via Google Satellite
The 1.93-acre property is located within the Westlake District, positioned between the Westlake Shopping Center and the Westlake Village Apartments, managed by Greystar. For regional transit, residents will be just eight minutes away from the Daly City BART Station via bus or bicycle. The shopping center is one of the first malls to open in America, with construction starting in 1949 by developer Henry Doelger and opening in 1951.
JETT is responsible for the landscape architecture, with civil engineering from Kimley-Horn and interior design by Vida Design. Palisade Builders is the general contractor. Completion is expected as early as Winter 2027.
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Looks good except for this building having roughly 28% of its interior square footage devoted to the storage of cars. This location has excellent public transit service. It’s a stone’s throw away from Samtrans stops that are served by two different routes, one of which has service every ten to fifteen minutes seven days a week and the other with less frequent but very good service. This is definitely a location where one can live well without an automobile.
Tell that to some poor senior citizen trying to come home from the market in the rain with three bags of groceries.
This isn’t New York or Chicago…people drive here.
There’s a grocery store across the street.
Worth noting: San Francisco has a higher per capita rate of transit ridership than Chicago, and Daly City has a higher rate of public transit ridership than Seattle, LA, Oakland, Baltimore, Pittsburgh, and numerous other cities, big and small – as per the U.S. Census Bureau.
The apartment unit to garage parking space ratio for this building is 1:1.35. Your poor senior citizen has nothing to worry about (except for congestion and pollution from all these new cars in the neighborhood or possibly a motorist mowing them down if they navigate the outdoors absent the protection of a steel box).
“the first new mixed-use apartment community to rise in Daly City in fifteen years.” !!! The land-use regime in California is absolutely exclusionary and criminal.
The usual suspects are gonna destroy what was once a great community. Progressive ideology.
This building will be out of proportion with the existing
Buildings and will cause much traffic congestion in the area. Parking will no doubt flow over in to the residential streets as it does now from the current apts.
I think it’s great. I grew up in Daly city and was 5 years old when Westlake opened. As a little girl I was chosen to pick a winning ticket out of a huge drum where patrons waited nervously to hear their winning numbers. I love Daly city and the augustien family did too.
Most people do NOT live and work in the same town. Need to have a vehicle and a place to park it.
BART connects Daly City with dozens of nearby municipalities, alleviating the need for an automobile in many cases.
BART and public transit is not practical or convenient when doing large shopping, or staying out late, or need to get to the emergency department of a hospital.
Bart is useless if you start earlier than 6am in a different city. Who wants to wake up 2 -3 hrs earlier just to take the bus when the work 10 miles away. Still need a car. There’s limited parking in Westlake.
Welp, that frame of mind is what’s ruined our towns and polluted our neighborhoods with emissions and tire dust. Maybe it’s time we build for those who want transit and services near them, not easy car access. There’s always Mountain House if you want easy parking
I used Bart everyday, but I’m not risking it anymore. Until you’ve sat on a hot meth pipe or syringe, you’d understand. Hepatitis is a MF’r…
@ Tony,
From my experience, BART is seriously cleaned up. (I’ve never had a bad experience despite daily use for years.) The pandemic was hard on SF and transit and major efforts have been made to reduce antisocial behavior like that which you refer to. I believe you’d be impressed if you got back on BART.
Now add 5 more of these around the parking lots of Westlake Mall
They didn’t have a choice other than to dedicate 288 spots for residents. That still won’t be enough, especially if you want to have a guest. I read the building plans that the staff for the retail and apartments would be parking in the shopping center across the street. Changes to the intersections will also be inevitable. With all the foot traffic and cars I dont see any other way this works.
Yeah, why do anything? Just give up on living in a city altogether.
If we were to adopt this mindset, you’d have a hollowed-out environment that resembles most major cities across the US. Two-thirds of the buildings bulldozed for cars and highways leave the last couple of bars and sad restaurants to fend for themselves, with half-occupied corporate towers defaulting on their finances, leaving a husk of a city a couple of decades later. Sound familiar? We have already done it once before.
All we do is cars, cars, cars, and yet we continue to fall short in meeting our infrastructure needs. Those then whine the Bay is too expensive, traffic sucks, and there’s no good housing as businesses move out to cheaper states where it’s more affordable to build. We fail to change our old ways and circle back to the same car-dependent design strategies that have failed us the first, second, and third times.
Why is it that the best neighborhoods in SF are the ones where it’s hardest to park, but we can’t fathom replicating that elsewhere?
Pathetic.
100%
Low income apartments too? Here comes the fentanyl xenomorphs!
Are you referring to San Francisco? People don’t like the public transportation. It’s filthy and they don’t enforce the law when it comes to paying for tickets. It smells and people don’t want to sit in some scavenger’s urine or other bodily fluids. I don’t want to see some homeless guy pleasuring himself in front of children. I’ve used Bart police app numerous times for the filth that sneaks onto BART. Progressive ideology is destroying SF. We need the national guard to come in like Chicago and DC! Please Mr. President, make the bay great again! 😄
I’m sitting on a bus in SF as I write this. Plenty of riders are on board with no aberrant behavior whatsoever, as is the case about 99% of the time on my daily transit trips.
When they converted the old bowling alley into Burlington Coat Factory, they put the floors over the lanes rather than remove the lanes. Would be cool if they could somehow reuse the wood rather than send it to the dump.