Bridge Flats Broke Ground in 2022. Mission Avenue Filled In Without It.

Drive down Mission Avenue in Olde Towne Bellevue and you'll pass a fenced lot between Washington and Jefferson Streets, the old footprint of Bellevue's City Hall. If you've lived here a while, you probably clocked that fence years ago and stopped expecting much from it. That's fair. The building that was supposed to rise there, a $12.3 million project called Bridge Flats, broke ground with a mayor, a congressman, and a marching band's worth of fanfare back in August 2022. Four years later, it's still on the list of projects Bellevue's own local paper tracks as "coming soon."

What actually happened on Mission Avenue in those four years is a different story, and it's the one worth knowing if you already call this street home.

What Was Supposed to Open on That Lot

The pitch in 2022 was straightforward. Mercury Builders, led by co-owner Jeff Gehring, would put up a four-story building with 53 luxury apartments and roughly 18,000 square feet of first-floor retail. Mayor Rusty Hike and Gehring gave the district a new name that day, the Frontier District, and talked about a grocery store, a fitness center, new restaurants, filling gaps that had sat empty in Olde Towne for decades.

Here's how the next four years actually went:

None of this means the project is dead. Redesigns for more retail and covered parking suggest a developer still working the deal. But it does mean that if you've been waiting for that lot to tell you something changed in Olde Towne, you've been waiting on the wrong signal.

While the Big Site Sat Behind a Fence

A few blocks and a few storefronts away, a different kind of opening kept happening, on a much shorter timeline.

• The Light House Cafe did a soft opening on October 12, 2022, two months after the Bridge Flats groundbreaking, at 119 W Mission Avenue. It's run as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit by operator Tracey Colgrove, who grew up near Bellevue and considered locations in Plattsmouth and Council Bluffs before a spot came open on Mission Avenue.
• That cafe doubled in size in the fall of 2024, taking over three adjoining bays to add a full-service coffee shop pouring locally roasted Reboot Roasting beans. It held its grand opening on Valentine's Day, February 14, 2025.
• Heritage Home Co., a boutique and gift shop, opened in November 2025 next to Dip Cravers, an existing dip, ice cream, and catering business. Both are run by Sarah and Matthew Milligan, who have lived in Bellevue for ten years.
• Swine Dining, the barbecue restaurant that's anchored Olde Towne since 2010, kept doing what it's done for sixteen years, giving the newer businesses something established to build a block around.

None of these are large projects. None came with a tax-increment financing package or a press conference with a congressman. They came with a couple who bought a home in the neighborhood and decided it needed a gift shop, and an operator scouting three different river towns before choosing Bellevue.

Sarah Milligan put it simply when Heritage Home Co. opened: "There's so much here worth driving for, great restaurants, shops, a coffee spot, an ice cream shop."

The Same Street, Two Different Clocks

Here's the part that's easy to miss if you only follow the headlines about the Frontier District. The amenities Gehring and Hike promised in 2022, the grocery store, the fitness center, the new restaurants, haven't shown up yet through that project. Gehring said at the groundbreaking he hoped Bridge Flats could "fulfill that need and many other services" missing from Olde Towne. That building still isn't open.

What did show up, on its own schedule, was a nonprofit cafe that grew into a full coffee shop, and a family-run boutique that plugged into an existing dip and ice cream business next door. Neither was part of anyone's official revitalization plan. Both are now part of what makes Mission Avenue feel like a street people choose to visit rather than pass through.

This isn't a story about one project failing and another succeeding. It's a reminder that a neighborhood's actual character often forms on a completely different clock than its headline development. If you've watched that fenced lot for four years and wondered whether Olde Towne was actually changing, the honest answer is yes, just not from the direction most of the announcements pointed.

What the Opportunity Zone Might Change

The newest variable arrived this summer. On July 23, 2026, the City of Bellevue announced that Olde Town Bellevue received federal Opportunity Zone designation, a status that gives investors preferential tax treatment on qualifying projects in the area. Mayor Hike called it a tool to align private capital with housing, small business development, and infrastructure. City officials pointed to a stack of complementary tools, including CDBG funding, LB 840 economic development dollars, and Bellevue's Builder's Center, as ways to make Olde Towne easier to invest in and build in going forward.

This designation is a federal tax incentive, not a guarantee. It doesn't fund anything by itself. It's a federal tax incentive that makes certain kinds of investment more attractive, and the City has said it plans to measure results over time, tracking housing units, commercial space, and jobs created in the zone. Whether that translates into faster movement on sites like the Bridge Flats lot, or into more small businesses following the Light House and Heritage Home Co. model, is genuinely an open question right now. Given how the last four years went for the neighborhood's marquee project, a little patience with the timeline seems earned.

What This Means If You Already Live Here

If you're in Olde Towne, the practical takeaway isn't to wait on any single announcement to define your neighborhood. That fenced lot may eventually become something significant, or it may go through another redesign first. Either way, the coffee shop, the boutique, and the barbecue place aren't waiting on it, and neither should your sense of what this street already offers.

For anyone weighing a move into Olde Towne or thinking about what a Mission Avenue address means day to day, the honest picture is a neighborhood that's filling in unevenly, with small, independently owned businesses doing more of the visible work than the large development everyone heard about first. That's not a knock on the bigger project. It's just where the evidence actually points as of this fall.

If you're curious what a home near Mission Avenue looks like right now, or how Olde Towne compares to other pockets of Bellevue near Offutt, Better Homes & Gardens | The Good Life Group has spent years working this specific stretch of Sarpy County. Contact a Good Life Group agent when you're ready to talk specifics.