Daly City · San Mateo County
The city where the garage door is the front door.
Daly City's own General Plan describes most of its neighborhoods as living space above a two-car garage. That one sentence changes how almost every lockout here is handled.
Garage under, living above
Read Daly City's Land Use Element and the same phrase keeps appearing. St. Francis Heights is "two story structures with living area above and two-car garage below". Serramonte is "two story structure with the living area over a two car garage". Southern Hills is "usually two stories with the living area over a two-car garage". North of John Daly Boulevard, Vista Grande is "one-story above a small one-car garage".
So the typical Daly City house gives you three exterior lock points and no more: the overhead garage door at street level, the man door from the garage into the house, and the entry door upstairs. There is usually no side gate and no back way in.
That is why the first question we ask on a Daly City house call is which of the three you are standing outside. If the garage is open and the inner door is locked, that is a different tool and a faster job than a front entry at the top of the steps.
Westlake is the exception
Henry Doelger built Westlake after the war on, in the City's words, "former sand dunes and cabbage patches annexed in 1948". The Land Use Element describes the houses as "generally split level, detached units constructed on 3,000 square feet or larger lots". Split level means the entry and the garage sit at different heights on the same face of the house, which sounds like a detail until you are trying to describe where you are on the phone at two in the morning.
City of Daly City, General Plan Land Use Element, and the General Plan Draft EIR, Land Use and Housing chapter.
The age of the stock, and why it matters to your key
Daly City's adopted Housing Element puts 40 percent of the housing at 1950s or earlier and roughly three quarters before 1980, out of 33,061 units. The growth curve is the striking part: the city went from 5,226 housing units in 1950 to 14,129 in 1960. Nearly tripled in ten years.
A stock built that fast, in that window, by a short list of merchant builders means long runs of identical doors with identical original hardware. If nobody has rekeyed since the tract was finished, the question worth asking is not whether your lock works. It is how many keys are still out there that fit it.
14 percent of Daly City housing is single-family attached, against about 7 percent statewide, and the City describes Crocker and the southern half of Vista Grande as having little or no side setbacks. Shared walls and no side yard mean the front door and the garage door are frequently the only ways in, and that a locksmith who assumes there is a back door is going to be standing there a while.
Daly City 5th-cycle Housing Element, tables HE-29 and HE-12; MTC census compilation for Daly City.
Three things that are true here and not in San Francisco
No historic exemption to hide behind
California Civil Code section 1941.3 makes a landlord fit a deadbolt with at least a thirteen-sixteenths inch throw on a rental's main entry, and subdivision (f) switches that duty off in a designated historical structure. San Francisco has hundreds of those. We found no local landmark register in Daly City at all, which means that in practice the state deadbolt duty applies to Daly City rentals without a carve-out.
Nobody is going to stop you changing your own front door hardware
Daly City has design review that regulates the exterior appearance of buildings visible from the street, and a design review combining district where even repainting needs approval first. Whether a door or a lock triggers it depends on the parcel. On an ordinary Daly City house, there is no Certificate of Appropriateness standing between you and a new deadbolt.
Your bungalow may be older than your neighbors think
Vista Grande north of John Daly Boulevard holds what the City calls its oldest single-family homes, including "California bungalows which have no garage". No garage means no second way in, and it means the greatest chance in the city of finding original pre-war hardware still mounted on the door.
Civil Code §1941.3; Daly City Municipal Code Title 17 design review provisions; Daly City General Plan Land Use Element. No Daly City minimum-security chapter was found, which is not the same as confirming none exists.
Where we go in Daly City
All thirteen Planning Areas. Westlake, St. Francis Heights, Skyline, the Sullivan Corridor, Serramonte, Peninsula Gateway, Vista Grande, Mission Street, the Colma and Daly City BART area, Hillside, Crocker, Southern Hills and Bayshore.
Top of the Hill, Original Daly City and Pointe Pacific are all ordinary runs. Broadmoor Village is unincorporated rather than Daly City, and we cover it the same.
In an emergency, 20 to 30 minutes. From our base south of Market the run down Mission or the 280 is short, and the slow part is usually finding the right door on a hillside street.
Questions people ask here
The garage door opener stopped and now I cannot get in at all.
Common, and worth saying on the phone. If the overhead door is dead and the house door is locked, we work the house door rather than fighting the garage. If the house door is the one that is open, we can usually get the overhead moving instead.
My street is all the same house. Should I be worried about the keys?
It is a fair question in a tract built in one go. Rekeying a cylinder is cheap and fast and does not need new locks. If you have just bought, it is the one thing worth doing on day one.
I live in a four-unit building on the Hillside. Can you do the shared door?
Your own unit door, yes, on your identification. The shared vestibule or gate belongs to the building and the owner or manager has to authorize it. Four-unit buildings rarely have a buzzer panel, so it is usually a key rather than an intercom problem.
Do you cover Colma and Broadmoor?
Yes, both, as ordinary calls.
Need a locksmith in Daly City now?
A person answers, at any hour, in English or Spanish. If it is not urgent, we will hold a day and a time for you instead.
Or leave your details and we will call you.