Drive east on New Hope Drive past the H-E-B Center right now and the skyline changes mid-block. One building glows, full parking lot, cars circling for a spot. Next door, silt fencing, a grader idling, and a sign promising something that hasn't broken ground yet. That's CedarView this month. One piece open. The rest still being poured.
The open piece is SCHEELS, and it opened loud. The retailer cut the ribbon Aug. 25 and threw a full grand-opening celebration Aug. 29, with skydivers landing in the parking lot, a drumline, food trucks, and the first 50 people in line camping overnight for pizza and merchandise. The store itself runs more than 300,000 square feet, SCHEELS' second Texas location and 35th nationwide, and it hired roughly 550 people to staff it, about 200 full-time and 350 part-time. Inside: a 65-foot indoor Ferris wheel, a 16,000-gallon saltwater aquarium, a candy factory, a T-Rex display, and 75 specialty shops selling everything from fly rods to home theater seating.
That's the part every local news outlet already covered a little over a week ago. What most of that coverage skipped is the sequencing. SCHEELS isn't CedarView. It's the first tenant to open inside a nearly 120-acre development at 750 E. New Hope Drive, and the pieces still coming will change what a trip out there actually means, in stages, over the next year and a half.
What's Built, What's Still a Rendering
Here's the honest state of the project as of this month:
| Piece | Status | Expected |
|---|---|---|
| SCHEELS (300,000+ sq. ft.) | Open | Opened Aug. 29, 2026 |
| NFM, formerly Nebraska Furniture Mart | Under construction | 2027 |
| Marriott hotel (nearly 300 rooms) | Under construction | Early 2027 |
| City-owned convention center (30,000 sq. ft.) | Under construction | 2027 |
| Haywire restaurant (10,000+ sq. ft.) | Not yet started | Late 2027 |
If you've been picturing CedarView as a finished district with a store, a hotel, and a restaurant row all humming at once, that's still a ways off. Right now it's one very large store surrounded by a construction site.
The Furniture Store Is Doing the Heavy Lifting
SCHEELS is the draw people are talking about, but NFM is the reason the city built the whole thing. The furniture retailer's Cedar Park store is expected to run more than 1.3 million square feet once it opens in 2027, close to 20 percent larger than Lakeline Mall and positioned as the second-largest retail store in Texas. That's not a strip-center anchor. That's a regional destination with its own gravitational pull, and city officials have talked about it in exactly those terms.
The scale explains the incentive package behind it. Cedar Park committed $45 million in performance-based rebates tied to a $400 million private investment and a requirement to create 725 jobs in the project's first year, a bet the city expects to generate $435 million in new tax revenue over the next 25 years. That kind of commitment is why New Hope Drive got the infrastructure upgrades it needed before a single store opened. SCHEELS is the appetizer. NFM is what the whole corridor was built around.
Haywire, the Texas-focused restaurant chain slated for the same development, won't break ground for another eight to nine months and isn't expected to open until late 2027, but its design brief already gives a sense of what's coming. FB Society CEO Jack Gibbons described the Cedar Park location as one built around
"a large outdoor space built for the way Texans gather for happy hours, weekend brunch or watching a game."
Marfa-and-Luckenbach styling, a 33-ounce tomahawk steak, a whiskey list built around Texas distillers. It sounds like a real destination. It's also more than a year out.
Everything Else Filled In While CedarView Was Still Grading Dirt
Here's the part that actually changes your weekend sooner than any of that. While CedarView's bigger pieces sit mid-construction, smaller retail moves elsewhere in Cedar Park finished on a much faster clock.
Whole Foods added roughly 8,000 square feet to its existing Cedar Park store, expanding into adjacent space without closing during the work. That construction wrapped in August 2026, the same month SCHEELS opened, meaning a project a fraction of the size finished on the same timeline as one small piece of a 120-acre megaproject.
Over at Lakeline Mall, BoxLunch, the pop-culture retailer under Hot Topic, began construction this month with a completion date of Nov. 13, 2026, according to a state filing. That's a full year before Haywire even breaks ground.
And the anchor that never stopped running through any of this: the Texas Farmers' Market at Bell, held every Saturday from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. in front of the Cedar Park Public Library. More than 90 vendors, about 40 percent of them agricultural producers sourcing within 150 miles, SNAP accepted year-round and WIC accepted April through October, live music every week, plus a Saturday-morning yoga session in the Bell Backyard. None of that waited on a Ferris wheel to open. It's been the reliable weekend fixture the whole time CedarView was still a construction fence.
What This Means for Your Next Free Saturday
Right now, you can ride the Ferris wheel, walk 75 specialty shops, and watch the saltwater aquarium at SCHEELS this weekend. You cannot yet valet at the Marriott, host a client dinner on Haywire's patio, or buy a sofa the size of a small car at NFM. Those pieces are real, they're funded, and the timeline for each one is public. But they land on different clocks, not all at once, and driving out to New Hope Drive expecting a finished district this fall means finding a parking lot that's still being paved next to the one that isn't.
If your Saturday routine needs something that's already fully open, the Texas Farmers' Market at Bell hasn't missed a week. If you want to see what a nearly $500 million retail bet looks like mid-build, New Hope Drive is worth the drive, with the understanding that you're watching act one of four.
Cedar Park keeps adding pieces like this because people keep choosing to live here, and that's the kind of neighborhood momentum that shows up in home values over time, not just parking lot traffic. If you're weighing what a corridor like this means for buying or selling nearby, Golden Real Estate Group tracks these local shifts as they happen. Book a Consultation when you're ready to talk through what it means for your specific street.
