Kane Realty has announced so many North Hills businesses in the past two years that keeping track by memory alone is a losing game. A storefront gets a name and a projected season, the rendering goes up on a construction fence, and then nothing visible happens for months. Meanwhile the actual restaurant next door has been serving lunch since spring. If you live anywhere near St. Albans Drive or Six Forks Road, you already know the feeling of driving past a sign that says "coming soon" for so long you stop reading it.
So here is the current state of things, sorted by what you can walk into today versus what is still just a name on a fence.
What You Can Actually Walk Into This Month
Good Graces opened in the Innovation District in August 2025, and it has settled into the kind of place regulars now treat as a fixture rather than a novelty. Co-founders Haley Borden and Lindsey Bayless built it as a hybrid, part cafe, part bar, part curated market, and chef Cody Ross, who came from Bread & Friends in Portland, Maine, runs a Southern menu built to feel lighter than the category usually allows. According to a piece in Walter Magazine, it has become a regular stop for corporate coffee meetings and afternoon Mahjong games, which tells you more about how a neighborhood actually uses a space than any opening-week write-up could.
Velvet Taco opened February 16, 2026, its first Raleigh location, taking over the former World of Beer space at the base of Captrust Tower in the Park District. Barking Dog, the pet-friendly restaurant with two locations in New York City, is also open in the Park District, having landed on Six Forks Road with the kind of patio seating that makes it an easy stop if you are already walking a dog through the area. Tifa Chocolate and Gelato opened October 1, 2025, and gives the Innovation District a dessert stop that did not exist a year ago.
None of these are replacing the anchors that were already working. Sweetgreen, Foxcroft Wine Co., and True Food Kitchen are established in the Main District at this point, and the Restoration Hardware Gallery, which opened during the 2024 holiday season, still draws people in for the rooftop restaurant alone. The point is not that North Hills reinvented itself overnight. It is that four genuinely new, currently operating businesses landed inside a single year, and if your mental map of the district is more than a year old, it is already out of date.
The Ones Still Waiting on a Storefront
Reformation, the sustainable womenswear brand, is slated to open its first Raleigh location in the Main District sometime in the first half of 2026, in the space between J.Crew and Veronica Beard. Face Foundrié, a facial bar, was targeting a summer 2026 opening in the Park District between Salon Blu and Massage Envy. Both were still listed as "coming soon" on Kane Realty's own North Hills news page as of this spring, alongside JETSET Pilates, a boutique fitness studio slated for the base of Park Central next to Orangetheory Fitness.
Benchwarmers Bagels and Standard Beer + Food were both penciled in for a June 2026 opening in the Innovation District, according to reporting from WRAL in May. By the time you read this, both should be pouring coffee and pulling pizzas, which is a useful reminder that the gap between announcement and actual door-opening in North Hills tends to run somewhere between two and six months, not the year-plus delay you sometimes see with the residential towers.
| Business | District | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Good Graces | Innovation District | Open since August 2025 |
| Velvet Taco | Park District | Open since February 16, 2026 |
| Barking Dog | Park District | Open |
| Tifa Chocolate and Gelato | Innovation District | Open since October 1, 2025 |
| Benchwarmers Bagels / Standard | Innovation District | Targeted June 2026 |
| Reformation | Main District | Targeted first half 2026 |
| Face Foundrié | Park District | Targeted summer 2026 |
| JETSET Pilates | Park District | Announced, no confirmed opening |
Why the Signs Keep Outrunning the Doors
The pattern makes more sense once you see the scale of what Kane Realty is building at once. In June 2026, Raleigh Magazine reported that the next phase of the Innovation District includes Veranda, a 207-unit building aimed at residents 55 and older, a 387-unit residential and retail building called Merit, and a 20-story tower named Vesper with a rooftop pool. A hotel with more than 200 rooms is also in the pipeline, potentially with a rooftop bar and street-level restaurant.
Construction has been underway since Tributary broke ground in late February 2026, a six-story, 332-unit apartment and retail building along Hardimont Road, and CBS17 reported that it is not expected to open until 2028. The Strand, a 20-story residential tower developed with Mitsui Fudosan America, broke ground in 2025 and is not slated for delivery until summer 2027, per Multi-Housing News. None of that is retail you can visit this weekend. It is the reason cranes are visible from the parking deck while the storefront next to Good Graces still has paper on the windows.
Why Six Forks Road Feels Worse Even Though the City's Own Numbers Disagree
This is the part that surprised me most in the reporting. A long-time North Hills resident named Hanchette told WRAL in May that the traffic has gotten noticeably worse over the past year, saying it "used to be one place you can kind of avoid" and now "you literally cannot avoid it." That tracks with how most people who drive Six Forks Road daily would describe it.
But when WRAL asked the city and Kane Realty to respond, the answer was not what you would expect. Available NCDOT data shows that traffic volumes on many nearby roads are actually lower today than when North Hills first opened, even after two decades of the district expanding. The frustration is real. The data just does not point to the cause most people assume. Part of what is happening is a widening gap between how congested a road feels during specific peak windows and what full-day traffic counts capture, and part of it is that a 2025 decision to scrap long-planned lane additions on Six Forks Road, due to rising costs, means the road's capacity has not grown even as the surrounding blocks have filled in.
The city's proposed fix is not small. Raleigh's Midtown multimodal bridge, first adopted as part of the Walkable Midtown Plan back in December 2020, would carry cars, bikes, and pedestrians over I-440 to connect to Barrett Drive. City Councilman Mitchell Silver told ABC11 that the project is estimated to cost between $50 million and $75 million and could take at least a decade to finish. Kane Realty has separately floated its own bridge, connecting Church at North Hills Street to Navaho Drive, alongside new greenway extensions designed around Big Branch Creek.
Meanwhile the zoning fights that make this growth possible are still playing out in real time. In January 2026, Raleigh's City Council voted to allow buildings up to 37 stories across nine North Hills properties near Six Forks and Lassiter Mill Road, a request Kane Realty had withdrawn once already in 2023 after community pushback over traffic and cost of living, according to WUNC. Just this month, Raleigh's Design Review Commission spent nearly four hours reviewing a proposed 15-story tower at the corner of Lassiter Mill Road and The Circle at North Hills Street and chose not to approve it as submitted, asking Kane Realty for more information on how the design meets city ordinances.
The Practical Version
If you live near North Hills, the useful takeaway is simple. Anything Kane Realty announces this year with a season attached, summer, fall, first half, tends to land within a few months of that window once construction actually starts. Anything still described as a filed site plan, like Veranda or Merit, is years out. And the traffic frustration you feel on Six Forks Road most evenings is legitimate even though the city's own counts complicate the story you'd expect. Neither the retail calendar nor the road project timeline is likely to slow down soon, so the district you knew a year ago is already a rough draft of the one you're driving through now.
I spend a lot of time in Midtown talking with people about how a neighborhood's growth actually shows up on their street, not just in a press release. If you are curious what all this expansion means for property values or timing in your specific part of North Hills or greater Raleigh, I am always glad to walk through it with you. You can reach out through John Merriman any time, no pressure, just a conversation grounded in what is actually happening on the ground.
