Cedar Park's New Hope Drive Has Two Growth Stories. Only One Has Opened.

Drive west on 183A past the H-E-B Center and you'll see it before you see anything else: a 65-foot Ferris wheel, turning slowly behind glass, inside a sporting goods store. Scheels held its grand opening on August 29, and for the first time in years of grading, permitting, and rendering after rendering, the CedarView site has something a resident can actually walk into.

Look past the Ferris wheel, though, and the rest of the 117-acre site is still dirt and steel. That gap between what opened and what's still coming is the story worth understanding if you live here, because Cedar Park currently has two separate "big news" developments moving at two very different speeds, and they happen to share a street name.

The Wheel Is Real. The Furniture Store Isn't.

Scheels is open. The 75 specialty shops, the 16,000-gallon saltwater aquarium with more than 600 fish, the taxidermy display, Ginna's Cafe: all of it is operating now at CedarView, on East New Hope Drive.

What isn't operating yet is the project Scheels was built to sit beside. NFM, the company formerly known as Nebraska Furniture Mart, is planning a 522,100-square-foot retail store backed by a 761,000-square-foot warehouse on the same site, according to the city's most recent construction tracker updated in late August. Alongside it, a 297-room Marriott hotel with 46,121 square feet of connected convention space is under construction. Both are expected to be complete in spring 2027.

That's a meaningful gap. The image most people have in their heads when they hear "CedarView" is the full package, the retail giant, the hotel, the convention center, the Ferris wheel, all humming at once. Right now that image describes maybe a third of the project. The rest is still six to eight months out at the earliest, and that's assuming no further delays on a build this size.

Same Road, Different Project, Different Year

Here's where it gets easy to mix things up. A few miles from CedarView, along the border where Cedar Park meets Leander, three well-known Austin restaurant names have been in local headlines for months: Pinthouse Pizza, Salt Traders Coastal Cooking, and Day Maker Half Day Cafe. All three filed construction plans this year for a development called New Hope-Scottsdale.

The address for that project is 1605 E. New Hope Drive. CedarView's address is 750 E. New Hope Drive. Same road, same general part of town, completely different developments with completely different owners and completely different timelines. If you've seen headlines about both projects this year, it's worth separating them cleanly, because conflating "New Hope Drive" as a single story leads to the wrong expectations.

Construction on all three restaurants was slated to begin this September, with the shell buildings themselves expected to be finished by June 2027. But a finished shell isn't a finished restaurant. Pinthouse has said publicly it's targeting the second half of 2027 for its actual opening, which will include the brand's first dedicated outdoor beer garden and expanded brewing capacity. Day Maker, which opened its first location in South Austin in late 2024, is eyeing summer 2027. Salt Traders hasn't attached a specific opening season yet, but it's tracking the same building timeline as its two neighbors.

None of that is bad news. It's useful news. If you've been holding off on weekend plans waiting for Pinthouse to show up, you're not waiting weeks. You're waiting closer to a year, and it's a different piece of New Hope Drive than the one with the Ferris wheel.

What's Actually Open Right Now

What You Can Actually Do This Weekend

If you want something that's open today rather than something arriving next year, Cedar Park already has a few answers.

PopStroke, the Tiger Woods-backed putting course and scratch kitchen concept, has been running since its April 21 launch and pairs two 18-hole putting courses with a full food and drink menu you can order to the green.

The Peached Tortilla added a family-friendly expansion called The Backyard back in February, with its own separate menu, a kids' menu built around butter noodles and mac and cheese, a play area, and Adirondack chairs and picnic tables for anyone who wants the restaurant's Asian and Southern-inspired food without the indoor dining room crowd.

And if big-box entertainment isn't the vibe you're after, the Bell District's Saturday farmers market is already a fixture, anchored by the two-story public library that opened in 2024 and the 15-acre Bell Park next door. It's a smaller, calmer version of what Cedar Park's growth is supposed to eventually feel like everywhere, minus the construction fencing.

What's Worth Watching Before The End Of The Year

Two dated events on the city's calendar are worth building a weekend around later this year. The Fall Roundup returns to Lakeline Park on November 7, and later in the season, Heritage Oak Park hosts the ceremonial lighting of Cedar Park's roughly 400-year-old Heritage Oak Tree, the event that traditionally kicks off the holiday season in town.

Neither requires you to track a permit filing or guess at an opening date. Both are simply on the calendar.

The pattern underneath all of this is worth remembering the next time a new Cedar Park headline crosses your feed: a groundbreaking announcement and a grand opening are not the same milestone, and knowing which one you're actually looking at is the difference between planning a weekend and planning a wait. Right now, the Ferris wheel is real. The furniture store isn't. The pizza and the beer garden are real too, just not yet, and not on this year's calendar.

If you're watching how these developments reshape property values, traffic patterns, or which parts of Cedar Park make sense for your next move, that's a longer conversation, and it's one the Ruth & Evonne Team has been having with Cedar Park residents and buyers all year. Reach out any time to request a personalized consultation.