Walk into Stonestown Galleria on a Sunday morning and you will find exactly what you found last Sunday, and the Sunday before that. The farmers market runs its usual hours in the lot next to the old UA Theatre, 9am to 1pm, folding tables lined up under the fog with produce from Rainbow Orchards and Dirty Girl Produce and whoever is doing the dumplings that week. Inside, Target and Whole Foods and Trader Joe's are doing what they always do. If you live in Forest Hill, St. Francis Wood, Ingleside Terrace, Miraloma Park or Balboa Terrace, this mall is the default answer to "where do we get groceries and also let the kids burn an hour," and nothing about that answer has changed this year.
Online, the story reads very differently. Search "Stonestown redevelopment" and you land in a pile of headlines from 2022 through 2024 about 3,500 new homes, 18-story towers, and a master plan that will remake the whole 40-acre site. Those headlines are accurate. They are also, as of September 2026, describing a project that has not put a shovel in the ground.
That gap between the headline and the parking lot is worth understanding if you shop, eat, or park at Stonestown regularly, because the timeline matters more than the plan.
The Vote That Looked Bigger Than It Was
On January 27, 2026, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors voted unanimously to approve something called an Infrastructure Financing Plan for the Stonestown project. If you saw that headline and assumed construction was starting, you were not alone, and you were also not right. The mall's own newsletter to the neighborhood was direct about it: the vote "does not authorize new construction or immediate development." What it actually does is create an Enhanced Infrastructure Financing District, a financing tool that lets the city capture future property tax growth from the site and reinvest it locally, covering things like affordable housing, transportation upgrades, and a replacement senior center down the line. It is plumbing for money, not a permit for bulldozers.
After that vote, the project entered what its own team calls a "post-entitlement mapping phase," described as largely technical and administrative, the kind of work that happens in planning offices rather than on 20th Avenue. Nobody is pouring concrete. Nobody has closed a parking lot. The mall's stated posture is to keep operating normally while that paperwork moves, because the retail center has to stay open through the entire multi-year build-out regardless of when it starts.
That distinction, financing plan versus construction permit, is the difference between "coming eventually" and "coming now." It is worth knowing before you assume a lane closure or a fenced-off lot means the big project has arrived.
What Has Actually Opened While the Paperwork Moves
None of this means Stonestown has been standing still. The mall itself keeps turning over tenants the ordinary way a shopping center does, independent of the master plan entirely. Since 2023, the old Nordstrom box has become Round1 Bowling & Arcade, which opened its doors on November 9, 2024. Around it, an entertainment cluster has built up that is unusual for an enclosed San Francisco mall: Immersive Gamebox, Escapology, and Activate Games all now share the property with the Regal multiplex.
On the retail side, a 2nd Street resale store moved in, and the food court has leaned harder into the flavor of the surrounding Sunset and West Portal neighborhoods. Kizuki Ramen, Kura Revolving Sushi Bar, Marugame Udon, Onigilly, 85°C Bakery Cafe, Uncle Tetsu, and Wanpo now sit alongside Shake Shack, Boudin, Ike's, and Chipotle. Add Blaze Pizza, Pieology, and Supreme Dumplings, and the food court at Stonestown looks less like a mall standby and more like a legitimate reason to drive over even if you weren't planning to shop.
None of that turnover required a vote from the Board of Supervisors. It is the mall doing what shopping centers do when they are trying to stay relevant, filling space as leases turn, which is a separate and much faster process than the housing master plan sitting in city review.
The Farmers Market Isn't Going Anywhere, But It Will Eventually Move
The one piece of Stonestown that does connect to the redevelopment, at least on paper, is the Sunday farmers market. Under Brookfield's master plan, the market is slated to get a new home in a "town square" on the west side of the site, surrounded by the parks and plazas that are supposed to eventually replace surface parking. That is a real feature of the approved plan, not speculation.
But "eventually" is doing a lot of work in that sentence. The market has run in its current spot, the lot beside the old theater, since 2009. It is managed by the nonprofit Agricultural Institute of Marin, which also runs Stonestown's designation as one of the city's highest-volume markets for CalFresh and Market Match redemptions. There is no announced date for moving it, because there is no announced date for the phase of construction that would require moving it. If you go every Sunday for the dumplings or the stone fruit, plan your next several years around it staying exactly where it is.
Why the Clock Keeps Resetting
Part of what makes Stonestown's timeline hard to pin down is baked into how the approval itself was structured. When the Board of Supervisors gave final sign-off in July 2024, the agreement built in roughly two years of planning and city permitting before construction could even begin on the first phase, which covers infrastructure work and a set of four-story townhomes in the northwest corner of the site, near the closed theater. Every phase after that, according to Stonestown's own public FAQ, begins "based on market conditions" as part of an anticipated construction cycle of fifteen years or more. That is not a fixed schedule. It is a schedule that responds to financing, interest rates, and demand, which can stretch a two-decade project into something longer without anyone technically missing a deadline.
San Francisco's west side has seen this pattern before. Parkmerced, the 5,700-unit redevelopment just south of Stonestown along 19th Avenue, was approved by the city in 2014. As late as 2022, eight years after that approval, it still had not broken ground, according to reporting at the time. Big residential master plans on this side of town tend to move in fits and starts tied to the broader real estate financing market, not straight lines from approval to opening day. Stonestown's own leadership acknowledged as much when Supervisor Myrna Melgar, whose district includes the site, called the 2024 approval "a very large down payment" on the city's housing goals rather than a finished project. A down payment is not a move-in date.
None of this is to say the concerns raised along the way haven't been real. When the project came up for its 2024 vote, residents did push back on specific pieces of it. The Ingleside Terrace Homeowners Association asked the city not to approve a planned 190-foot tower along 19th Avenue, and a separate San Francisco resident raised concerns about how added traffic on 20th Avenue would square with the city's own better streets planning. Those are the kinds of details that get resolved, revised, or renegotiated over years, which is itself part of why the calendar keeps sliding.
What This Means If You Shop There This Fall
If you are heading to Stonestown for back-to-school supplies at Target, a Sunday market run, or bowling at Round1 on a Friday night, the practical answer is simple: nothing about your routine there is at risk this year. No parking has been removed for construction. No section of the mall has closed for the master plan. The changes you are seeing, the new arcade tenants, the expanded food court, the 2nd Street resale rack, are ordinary retail turnover that would happen with or without the 3,500-home plan sitting in the city's pipeline.
What is worth watching, if you want an early signal that Phase 1 is actually starting rather than still being financed, is activity in that northwest corner near the shuttered theater. That is where the first infrastructure work and townhomes are supposed to land whenever construction does begin. Until you see permits posted or fencing go up specifically there, the rest of the mall, including your Sunday market, is operating on the same timeline it always has.
For now, the loudest thing happening at Stonestown is the news coverage. The mall itself is quieter than that, and for west side residents, quieter is the more useful thing to know.
If you're weighing what a home near this corridor is worth given how slowly (or quickly) projects like this actually move once approved, Meagan Levitan can walk you through it. Request a Confidential Home Valuation to get a clear, current read on your property, grounded in what's actually happening on the ground rather than what's circulating in the headlines.
