Mission Street's Top of the Hill corridor draws its biggest crowd of the year on Saturday, October 17, when the third annual Top of the Hill Festival closes down a half-mile of the street between John Daly Boulevard and Mission for six hours, from noon to 6 p.m. Free admission, live music, food vendors, an estimated 20,000 people walking a stretch of sidewalk that most days serves commuters heading to BART or to the grocery store. That much has been true for three years running.
What changed this year happened almost entirely off Mission Street, inside a series of Daly City Small Business Commission meetings that most festival attendees never heard about. In February, city staff told the commission that a three-year push to formally fund improvements along the corridor was on track. By July, staff came back with a different message: the plan had failed, and the businesses along Mission Street were about to do something the property owners wouldn't.
Three Years of Work, One Vote Short
The effort started in 2023 as an attempt to create a Property-Based Business Improvement District, a formal mechanism that would let the city collect an assessment from property owners along Mission Street and reinvest it in things like street cleaning, lighting, or events. Getting there took two years of feasibility work and outreach, plus coordination with regional partners including ABAG and Eden Housing. By February 2026, a steering committee made up of property and business owners was drafting district boundaries, stretching from Vista Grande near Tri Counties down to Sickles. The plan was to petition for formal formation by June and put the measure on a ballot.
That petition didn't get there. When staff updated the commission again on July 9, they reported that the PBID exploration hadn't secured enough property-owner support to move forward. Rather than shelve the project, the steering committee pivoted to a different model entirely: a business-funded Business Improvement District, where the assessment is collected through business licenses rather than property tax rolls. One staff member summarized the shift plainly at the meeting, framing it as businesses choosing to tax themselves rather than wait on landlords to agree to an assessment.
The mechanics matter here. A PBID gets collected by the county through property tax bills, which means it needs buy-in from whoever owns the building, whether or not they operate a business inside it. A BID gets collected by the city through business licenses, which means the people paying are the ones actually running the shops, cafes, and services day to day. Mission Street's property owners wouldn't commit. Its business owners are apparently willing to. The city expects council hearings on the new model this fall, with a vote projected by December.
The Businesses the Vote Is Actually About
Walk Mission Street today and you're walking past the businesses this funding fight is meant to support. Top of the Hill Cafe at 6300 Mission has been serving donuts, banh mi, and breakfast burritos out of a small storefront since well before anyone started talking about improvement districts, and it's become enough of a fixture that people compare its banh mi favorably to the lines at Saigon Sandwiches without needing to drive into the Tenderloin. A few blocks down, Fog City Cafe at 6185 Mission keeps its menu tight, built around espresso and a Honduran baleada, a folded tortilla stuffed with beans, cheese, and eggs.
Further along the corridor:
- 13 Gallons, a screen printing shop at 6261 Mission that does traditional hand-pulled prints for outside clients and its own merchandise line
- Rosi's Alfajores, a cash-only bakery turning out Peruvian-style alfajores with dulce de leche
- Bad Axe Throwing, an urban ax-throwing club a few blocks off Mission on Hill Street
- The Daly City History Museum at 6351 Mission, housed in the old John Daly Library building and run entirely by volunteers through the Daly City History Guild
That museum detail is worth sitting with. It's open exactly four days a month, the first four Saturdays, noon to 3 p.m., staffed by a volunteer guild preserving photos and documents that go back to the 1880s. It's the kind of business that has no path to funding itself through customer revenue and everything to gain from a functioning improvement district that might help with signage, lighting, or foot traffic on the days it's open.
None of these businesses are large enough to individually negotiate their way into city planning conversations. Collectively, through a business-funded BID, they'd have a mechanism to pool resources for exactly the kind of upkeep that makes a festival crowd want to come back the other 364 days of the year.
What the Festival Actually Proves
The Top of the Hill Festival isn't funded by any improvement district. It's a city-organized event, run through Daly City's own calendar of programming, and it draws its crowd on reputation alone. Now in its third year, it pulls people across more than half a mile of festival grounds, according to the city's own figures, without needing an assessment mechanism to make that happen.
That's the tension worth naming. The corridor already proves it can draw a crowd for one Saturday in October. What it hasn't yet proven is whether it can fund the daily maintenance, the reason a bakery like Rosi's or a shop like 13 Gallons stays open on a Tuesday in February when there's no festival stage and no live music, just regular foot traffic past storefronts that depend on the street looking cared for.
A festival is a one-day event. A business improvement district, if it clears its council vote, is a permanent fixture. The gap between those two things is the actual story of Mission Street this fall. The festival tells you the street has an identity people show up for. The BID vote will tell you whether the businesses on that street can agree to fund what keeps that identity intact the other 51 weeks of the year.
What to Watch Before December
If you're on Mission Street with any regularity, three dates are worth marking. October 17 is the festival itself, still the easiest way to see the corridor's businesses set up shop-front tables and reach a crowd many times larger than their usual foot traffic. The council's first and second readings on the business-funded BID are expected sometime this fall, ahead of a public hearing. And the vote itself is projected for December, which is when Daly City will find out whether Mission Street's business owners can do collectively what its property owners couldn't.
Whatever the council decides, the corridor's daily texture won't change overnight. Top of the Hill Cafe will still open at 5:30 in the morning. Fog City Cafe will still be one of the few coffee shops on that stretch. The museum will still open its doors four Saturdays a month, funded or not. But if the BID clears, it'll be the first time in years that Mission Street has a formal, sustained way to reinvest in itself, built not on landlord consensus but on the businesses that show up every day, festival or not.
If you're curious about what a corridor like this means for property values or renovation potential nearby, that's a longer conversation, and one Perry Kayasone is glad to have. Call Perry.
