El Camino Real Is Changing on Three Different Clocks This Fall

Drive the stretch of El Camino Real through San Carlos this month and three things compete for your attention. There's a new sign on a building that's carried the same name for as long as most people have lived here. There's a chain-link fence around a lot that used to have a CVS. And somewhere in your inbox or your mailbox, there's a survey or a ballot measure asking what you think should happen to the road itself.

None of these three things caused the others. That's the part worth sitting with. What looks like a corridor suddenly waking up is actually four separate processes, moving at four separate speeds, that happen to be hitting visible milestones in the same twelve months. A restaurant lease. A five-year apartment build. An eight-to-ten-year transportation plan. A fourteen-year tax measure on this November's ballot. San Carlos didn't decide to overhaul El Camino Real all at once. The clocks just happened to line up.

The Bar That Came Back

The fastest-moving piece is the one you can walk into tonight. On September 1, Zac's Bar & Grill opened at 1748 El Camino Real, in the space that spent 14 years as The Office Bar & Grill before closing in March 2025. New owners Zaki Massis and Btool Nazerial are running it now, with burgers, cocktails, and plans for trivia and karaoke nights on the calendar. Massis, who lives in Belmont and has been in the Bay Area for over a decade, previously worked as a business operations manager at Waterfront Restaurant in Foster City.

The building itself has a longer memory than either name on its lease. According to local history recorded by the White Oaks Blog, the site functioned as a neighborhood watering hole going back to San Carlos's incorporation, long before Gateway Properties partners Dave Parks and Steve Hicks converted part of their real estate office into The Office Bar & Grill in 2010. Zac's is technically the third act for a building that's been serving drinks on El Camino Real for close to a century.

"I love the area, neighborhood and community," Massis told Palo Alto Online, adding that Zac's "loves people, engages with the community and gives back."

This is the clock that runs on a lease cycle, not a planning process. The space sat empty for about a year and a half. Now it's open again. That's the whole arc.

The Site That Waited Five Years

A mile or so down the road, a different kind of clock just ticked forward. In July, SummerHill Apartment Communities broke ground on 11 El Camino Real, a 251-unit rental development on 2.2 acres between the Belmont and San Carlos Caltrain stations, on the site of a former CVS. City officials call it the largest housing development in San Carlos history. The project includes 38 affordable units spread across very-low and low-income tiers, alongside 213 market-rate units, in a mix running from studios to three-bedrooms.

The building, designed by architecture firm KTGY, will rise to 78 feet across roughly 393,000 square feet, with amenities that include a pool, a clubroom, a fitness center, and parking for 292 cars and 84 bicycles. Future residents will be about 15 minutes on foot, or 4 minutes by bike, from either Caltrain station. Completion is expected as early as 2028.

What makes this a slower clock than the Zac's story is the runway behind it. The original 242-unit proposal was approved back in September 2023. It took until 2026 for the amended, 251-unit version to actually break ground, and it won't open for another two years after that. If you've been driving past that fenced lot wondering when something will happen, the answer is: something already did. The waiting was the point.

The Plan That Started Before Either

The slowest clock on El Camino Real isn't tied to any single address. It's a planning process that treats the entire road as one corridor.

SamTrans, along with the cities of San Mateo, Belmont, San Carlos, and a portion of Redwood City, is midway through the Central El Camino Real Multimodal Plan, an effort to redesign an eight-and-a-half-mile stretch of the road for safer walking, biking, and transit use. Public feedback on Phase 2 design alternatives ran through the end of March this year, and the plan now feeds into a much larger effort called the Grand Boulevard Initiative, whose action plan was adopted by the SamTrans Board in January 2026.

The Grand Boulevard Initiative covers 22 miles and 15 jurisdictions across San Mateo County, with an estimated price tag of $750 million. SamTrans officials have told county commissioners the full process, from planning through actual construction, will likely take eight to ten years. As of this year, the project is just entering the Caltrans Project Initiation Document phase, which is the formal first step toward eventual state funding. In other words, if you're picturing protected bike lanes on El Camino Real next spring, that's not the timeline. This clock is still in its opening minutes.

The Ballot Measure That Ties It Together

The fourth clock is the one San Carlos voters will actually set themselves. This November, the city has placed a half-cent sales tax measure on the ballot, projected to generate about $6 million a year for 14 years if approved. City officials point to a widening gap between what San Carlos has planned and what it can currently afford: roughly $200 million in unfunded capital improvement projects, with street repaving costs alone up 62% between 2017 and 2023. Council members have also connected the measure to downtown streetscape work, an area where the city has said it needs about $20 million in new local funding just to unlock roughly $65 million in planned improvements.

This measure runs on its own separate track from the SamTrans corridor plan. It's city money, not county or state money, and it's aimed at general infrastructure and downtown upgrades rather than the multimodal redesign specifically. But it lands on the same street, in the same season, which is part of why the corridor feels like it's all moving together even though the money, the agencies, and the timelines don't actually overlap.

Same Street, Different Clocks

Here's the pattern, laid out side by side:

None of these four things needed the others to happen. A restaurant reopening doesn't require a road redesign. A road redesign doesn't require a new apartment building next to the tracks. The reason El Camino Real feels different this fall isn't that San Carlos executed a master plan. It's that a private lease, a private development, a regional government process, and a local ballot measure all happen to be crossing a visible marker in the same calendar year.

That distinction matters for anyone trying to figure out what to actually expect. The new bar sign means exactly what it looks like: there's a new bar. The construction fence at 11 El Camino Real means apartments are coming, on a timeline that stretches to 2028. The corridor plan means bike lanes and safer crossings are a real possibility, but one still measured in years, not months. And the ballot measure is the one piece where residents get an actual say, this November, in whether the city has the money to keep pace with any of it.

If you've noticed El Camino Real looking different lately, you weren't imagining it. You were just watching four clocks tick past each other at once.

For more on what's happening in San Carlos beyond this stretch of road, our San Carlos neighborhood page tracks the city's ongoing changes, and our earlier look at downtown energy and outdoor living in San Carlos covers a different part of the same story. If you're weighing what any of this means for your own corner of San Carlos, Gianna Archini and the Archini & Sebastian Group live and work in these neighborhoods every day and are always glad to talk through what's changing and why. When the time comes to put a number on it, you can request a home valuation directly from our site.