Valley Landing Is Coming. The Casey's and the Fareway Are Not on the Same Clock.

"Our vision is to have a destination. We call it Valley Landing for a reason." That's how developer Kirk Hanson described the project going up on former farmland at the edge of town, in an April 2026 interview with KMTV. Hanson, who works with Access Commercial and grew up in the area, was talking about ten planned businesses and 25 acres of new housing. He wasn't just describing a shopping center. He was describing two different projects wearing one name, moving at two different speeds, and if you live in Valley, the gap between those speeds is the part worth understanding.

Two Timelines, One Development

Valley Landing gets talked about as a single thing coming to town. It isn't. It's a gas station and a grocery store, and they're on separate schedules that don't overlap the way most announcements make it sound.

Casey's moved fast. As of the April 2026 report, construction on the convenience store and fuel stop was expected to start within the week. That's a company with a standard build process and a familiar footprint, the kind of project that goes from groundbreaking to open doors in a matter of months.

Fareway is the slower half of the story, and it's slower by a lot. The chain first announced plans for a 21,000-square-foot store in Valley back in 2024, with due diligence wrapping up and a property closing expected in early 2024. Two years later, per the April 2026 update, that store still hadn't broken ground. The same report put the timeline at another one to two years out from that point.

Read those two rows side by side and the lesson is plain. If you've been waiting for a grocery store you can walk to, the wait started before this year's headlines and it isn't over. If you've been waiting for a closer place to fill up your tank, that part moves on a normal construction calendar and could already be underway by the time you read this.

Why the Land Sat Empty This Long

The obvious question is why a grocery chain would announce a store in 2024 and still not have broken ground two years later. Hanson answered that one directly. The site had been farmland, and before it could carry a parking lot and a building pad, the ground itself had to be raised and leveled.

"This entire site was in the flood plain," Hanson said, pointing to the 2018 floods that hit multiple sections of the property. That single fact explains a lot about why this stretch of Valley stayed vacant while other parts of the Omaha metro filled in around it. It wasn't a lack of interest from retailers. It was dirt that had to be moved before anyone could pour a foundation, and that kind of site work doesn't show up in a headline the way a grocery store announcement does.

It's a useful reminder for anyone tracking development along the Elkhorn River corridor generally. A flood plain designation doesn't just complicate the permitting conversation. It adds years to a project before the first shovel goes in the ground, and that lag is invisible until someone explains it out loud.

Main Street Already Solved a Different Problem

While Valley Landing works through site prep and grocery timelines, the town's existing commercial strip has been building itself the old way, one small business at a time.

Simply Delicious Restaurant sits on Main Street and started life as a bakery before owner Wendy Deane grew it into a full lunch, brunch, and dinner spot. Next door is The Gallery, along with a home shop and a gift shop on the same block. Down the street, Brew Coffee House & Tasting Room has served Valley and the surrounding Douglas County area since 2016. Add Gambino's Pizza and Spruce Street Tavern to the list and you get a picture of a Main Street that didn't wait on a developer's timeline to fill in. It grew business by business, each one built around whoever was willing to put in the years.

That's a different growth model than Valley Landing, and it's worth naming as different rather than treating both as the same kind of progress. Main Street answered the question of where to eat, get coffee, or find a gift on a Saturday afternoon, and it answered it years ago through individual owners investing in individual storefronts. Valley Landing is answering a separate question, the one about where to buy gas and groceries without a drive into Omaha, and that answer is arriving on a developer's schedule with a national chain's construction standards. Neither one replaces the other. They're solving two different daily-life problems that happened to sit a few blocks apart.

What This Actually Changes for Someone Already Living Here

If you already live in Valley, the practical takeaway isn't "something new is coming." It's knowing which part of that something applies to you this year and which part applies in 2027 or later.

The gas station piece moves on a normal timeline. If Casey's construction started when the April report indicated, a fuel stop that doesn't require the Omaha drive could be a realistic near-term change to how you plan errands.

The grocery piece is a longer wait than the announcements suggest. The April 2026 report put the start of construction, not the opening, one to two years out from that point. That means ground may not break until sometime in 2027 or 2028, with an actual opening trailing further behind that. That's not a criticism of the project. It's just what a flood plain site actually costs a retailer in time, and it's worth knowing before you start planning your weekly shopping trip around a store that isn't open yet.

Hanson framed the bigger picture as a shift in how close Valley feels to Omaha, describing the area as one that used to feel like a long drive and now sits about 14 minutes from his office. Whether that 14 minutes matches your own commute depends on where in town you're starting from, but the direction of the change is real. A gas station this year, a grocery store in a year or two, and a town that's slowly gaining the kind of everyday infrastructure that used to mean a drive out.

None of this touches Main Street's version of Valley, which was already working before any of this development got announced. Simply Delicious isn't competing with a future Fareway. Brew Coffee House isn't waiting on Casey's to open before people show up for their morning order. The two versions of Valley, the one built storefront by storefront and the one being built lot by lot at the edge of town, are running in parallel, not in a race.

If you're watching this corridor because you're weighing a move to Valley or wondering what a property near the new development might be worth once it's finished, that's a longer conversation, and it's one Laura Hervert has with buyers and sellers across the Omaha metro regularly. For now, the useful thing to know is simple. One clock is running fast. The other one is running slow. Plan your year around the one that actually matches your patience.

If you want to talk through what any of this means for a specific address in Valley, Better Homes & Gardens | The Good Life Group is a call away. Contact a Good Life Group agent.