Walk past 299 Mercer Street this month and you will see scaffolding against a limestone facade that has watched Dripping Springs change shape since 1937. Drive three miles west on 290 and you will see a different kind of activity: dirt moving, foundations forming, a 147,000-square-foot footprint taking shape on a lot that was still empty land less than a year ago. Both are proof the town is growing. Only one of them took six years to get this far.
That gap is not a coincidence and it is not bad luck for the smaller project. It is the clearest evidence available right now of how two different parts of Dripping Springs actually operate, and if you live near Mercer Street, it explains something you have probably already noticed: downtown changes in small, deliberate increments while the highway corridor changes in leaps.
The Garage On Mercer And College
The building at 299 Mercer sits on the southeast corner of Mercer and College Streets. City historic preservation records identify it as the Haydon Central Garage, a front-gabled stone structure built in 1937 with an addition in 1954, topped with a pyramidal-roofed porte cochere. It operated as a gas station around the clock at one point. When Highway 290 bypassed Mercer Street in 1964, the owner moved his business out to the new road, and a mechanic named Jake Spears leased the garage for a repair shop starting in 1967. After that, it sat empty for decades, one of the contributing structures in what is now the Mercer Street Historic District.
That is the building Scott Roberts bought in 2020 to open Roxie's, a restaurant named for his grandmother and built around the fried chicken, mashed potatoes, and creamed corn she served after church. Roberts has family ties to The Salt Lick BBQ, and the plan for Mercer Street has been public for years: full bar, covered patio, family recipes translated into a menu. What has not been public, until recently, is a firm sense of when any of it would actually open.
What Actually Slowed It Down
The delay was not financing and it was not a change of heart. It was the calendar that comes with putting a modern restaurant inside a building the city has designated historic. A contributing structure in the Mercer Street Historic District goes through preservation review before a shovel touches it, and that review does not move at restaurant speed. Roberts acquired the property in 2020. As of mid-2025, reporting on the project still described it as recently approved, with a hopeful opening sometime in 2026, five years after the purchase.
Public construction filings now show the project registered in January 2025, with a review status marked complete and construction underway. The addition is valued at just under 1.9 million dollars across roughly 7,300 square feet, a modest footprint by any commercial standard. As of this writing, there is still no confirmed opening date. A restaurant smaller than most suburban chain locations has taken longer to reach a construction site than it will likely take to build.
A Different Clock Three Miles West
Compare that to the timeline for Target. In February 2026, a company spokesperson confirmed what permitting documents had hinted at since the previous fall: Target is building a store on West Highway 290, anchoring a new development called The Village at Dripping Springs. The site sits on more than 26 acres near the Belterra neighborhood, between CVS and the Dripping Springs Racquet Club, and the store itself will run somewhere between 145,000 and 147,000 square feet, roughly twenty times the size of Roxie's addition.
By March, construction filings showed a real schedule. Site work was expected to begin in early May 2026 and finish by mid-November 2027, an eighteen-month build for a project that only became public a few months earlier. Target purchased more than ten acres at the site outright in January 2026, buying from a shell company connected to the original developer, Property Commerce, a Houston-based firm that has built more than 80 shopping centers, over 43 of them anchored by Target stores. Site construction alone is estimated at 7.5 million dollars.
Do the arithmetic and the contrast gets sharper. From public confirmation to groundbreaking, Target moved in about three months. Roxie's took five years just to clear its historic review, and the restaurant is still finishing construction with no announced opening date. The Target site, once it broke ground in May, is now a few months into an eighteen-month build, meaning it may well open before Roxie's does, despite starting from bare dirt against a building that already had four walls and a roof.
The corridor around that Target is not empty land waiting for its first tenant either. Neighboring the site already are OrangeTheory, Chick-fil-A, Dunkin, Torchy's Tacos, an H-E-B, and a Jersey Mike's, a cluster that reads less like a frontier expansion and more like a highway commercial district filling in the gaps it always had.
The Small Swaps That Keep Downtown Moving
None of this means Mercer Street is standing still. It means downtown changes through substitution rather than expansion, one storefront swapping for another instead of new square footage arriving all at once.
Rice and Oak Thai Texas Grill Kitchen opened downtown early this year, the brick-and-mortar successor to Aroi Thai, a food truck that owner Siwaphan Sampaotong ran in Belterra for a decade before making the leap to a permanent kitchen. A few blocks over, Beerburg Events opened a new outdoor beer garden with native landscaping this May, marked with a ribbon-cutting alongside the Dripping Springs Chamber of Commerce on May 28. The space runs weekend afternoons, two to eight.
Those openings came alongside closures that freed up the storefronts making room for them. Garbo's, the Austin lobster roll spot that opened downtown in April 2024, closed on January 25 of this year, not even two years after arriving, though the brand still operates two Austin locations. Juniper Tree Market, a downtown shop selling jewelry, apparel, and decor, closed after five years in business the same month.
Even the town's infrastructure moves on this smaller scale. Dripping Springs installed its first public restrooms on Mercer Street last year, a four-stall project that cost an estimated 365,000 dollars, funded in part through the city's Tax Increment Reinvestment Zone, the fund set aside specifically for improvements inside the historic core. It is a modest project by the standard of a highway shopping center, and it was treated as significant enough to warrant its own ribbon-cutting timed to Founders Day.
Why The Gap Actually Matters If You Live Here
None of this is a complaint about slow permitting or a case for faster review. It is a description of how the two halves of Dripping Springs actually function, and it explains something real about what you can expect from each of them going forward.
The highway corridor absorbs capital at commercial real estate speed. A developer with a track record of more than 80 shopping centers can identify a site, secure a national retailer, and have a 147,000-square-foot building underway within months of public confirmation, because the land carries no historic designation and no review beyond standard permitting. That corridor will keep adding square footage in large, fast increments, and the businesses already clustered there, from Chick-fil-A to Torchy's Tacos, suggest it will keep filling in rather than starting from scratch.
Mercer Street runs on a different clock because the buildings themselves are the asset the town is protecting. A restaurant with a five-year path from purchase to permit is not evidence that downtown is stagnant. It is evidence that the historic garage on the corner of Mercer and College is still the same garage it was in 1937, even with a restaurant now taking shape inside it, and that any future project on that street will move at the same deliberate pace. If you bought a home near downtown for its texture rather than its convenience, that pace is the mechanism protecting the thing you bought.
Roxie's will open. Rice and Oak already has. Beerburg Events already opened its gates in May. The Target will likely be serving customers before 2027 is over. Both halves of the town are moving. They are simply moving on schedules that have very little to do with each other, and knowing which schedule governs which part of Dripping Springs is the difference between being surprised by the pace of change here and understanding exactly why it looks the way it does.
If you are weighing what a home near Mercer Street or out along the 290 corridor actually means for how your neighborhood will feel in five years, that is a conversation worth having with someone who tracks these timelines for a living. Jana Birdwell works this market year round and is glad to talk through what a given block of Dripping Springs is likely to look like next.
