Downtown Urbandale Doesn't Exist Yet. The City Bought the Land Anyway.

Last October, a nondescript parking lot on Douglas Avenue turned into a three-hour party. Food trucks, live music, games, and by one count more than 500 people showed up to stand around in a space that, on any other Tuesday, is just asphalt. Clint Dudley, who owns Shade Tree Auto a few doors down and sits on the city's Downtown Stakeholders Group, remembers the crowd closer to 700. Either way, it was the first time most of the people there had ever seen that block used for anything other than parking.

Here's the part that should surprise you if you live in Urbandale: nothing about that lot has changed since. There's no building there. There's no construction fence. The city calls this area "Downtown Urbandale," and it has for years, but if you drove down Douglas Avenue tomorrow looking for a downtown, you wouldn't find one. What you'd find is a four-lane commuter cut-through, a scattering of low-slung commercial buildings, and, since 2025, a growing paper trail of land purchases the city made before it had a single rendering approved for what goes on that land.

That's the real story of 2026 in this part of Urbandale. The plan isn't new. The dirt underneath it just changed hands.

The City Didn't Know What to Call Its Own Downtown

Urbandale's economic development director, Aaron DeJong, has said the quiet part out loud more than once: a lot of residents didn't know Urbandale had a downtown at all. That's not a knock on anyone. Roughly 80 to 90 percent of the traffic on Douglas Avenue is just passing through, DeJong has noted, which is the opposite of what a downtown is supposed to do. People don't stop. They don't shop. They don't stick around for dinner. They just use it to get somewhere else.

So in February 2026, the city hired De Novo Marketing, a branding firm out of Cedar Rapids, specifically to answer a question that sounds almost absurd for a city planning department to ask: is "Downtown Urbandale" even the right name for this place? That's not a marketing exercise layered on top of a finished plan. It's evidence that the plan itself is still being built in real time, one identity decision at a time.

The Buying Happened Before the Building Did

The Urbandale Downtown Master Plan, the actual redevelopment blueprint for this stretch of Douglas Avenue, was approved by city council on June 17, 2025, after months of stakeholder meetings and open houses that ran from February through May of that year. That's a different document from the city's broader comprehensive plan, adopted back in December 2023, which had simply flagged downtown as one of three areas worth a closer look. The 2025 vote was the moment the vision got specific: eight recommendations, a 20-year horizon, and a direct call to convert Douglas Avenue from four lanes to three.

What happened next is the part worth paying attention to if you live nearby. Two weeks before that vote, on June 3, 2025, the city council was set to take up two separate property purchase agreements tied to the downtown redevelopment effort. Council deferred both, on the record, specifically to let the master plan get formally adopted first. In other words, the city had land deals ready to go and was holding them until the plan became official before moving. By December 2025, staff told council the city had made two major purchases and had a third under contract specifically to get, in their words, the middle of the biggest block moving. One of those purchases was the old Econo Lodge on Douglas Avenue, which the city is now reviewing proposals to redevelop into multi-family housing.

That same December meeting is where the number that should stick with you came up: staff recommended a $36 million capital improvements allocation to fund the first wave of public infrastructure, pavement markings, preliminary engineering, and plaza work, all aimed at making it easier for private developers to build once the city has already done the unglamorous work of assembling and de-risking the land. A proposed office building from Cadence Development and a mixed-use block next to a planned city-owned plaza are the first private projects staff pointed to as the payoff for that spending.

Cities don't usually spend real money before a private developer shows up with a shovel. Urbandale did it anyway, and the sequencing tells you the city is trying to make this redevelopment nearly impossible for a private builder to say no to.

Two Corners, Not One Big Site

If you're picturing a single sweeping project, that's not what this is. The plan concentrates redevelopment around two specific intersections: 70th Street and Douglas, and 67th Street and Douglas. Those are the two nodes city staff and consultants kept returning to across a full year of stakeholder meetings, from the initial framing sessions in 2024 through the detailed infrastructure talks in February 2025. The idea is to prove the concept works in two contained spots rather than trying to remake the entire Merle Hay Road to 75th Street corridor all at once.

Multi-story buildings with ground-floor retail and upper-floor housing are the specific format on the table for both nodes, according to the plan documents. That's a real departure from what's zoned there today, which is low-density neighborhood commercial, built for single-story strip retail and drive-through traffic, not the kind of walkable block the plan describes.

The Lane You'll Actually Notice

Here's the change that will hit you before any building does. The plan calls for turning Douglas Avenue from a four-lane road into a three-lane road, with a center turn lane and on-street parking added along the north side. In 2026, the city is starting with a pilot: pavement markings to test the three-lane configuration, paired with preliminary engineering and design work for the Madison and 71st Street intersections.

That's a road diet, and it's a deliberate one. City staff have said publicly that adding friction, more landscaping, on-street parking, slower posted speeds, is meant to make drivers feel like they should slow down rather than treat Douglas Avenue as a bypass. If you drive that stretch daily, this is the first tangible sign the plan is moving from paper to pavement, literally.

What's Actually On Your Calendar This Fall

If you want to see any of this up close rather than read about it secondhand, two dates are already on the books. On August 12, 2026, the city held an open house called "Downtown Urbandale: What Could Be Built Where?" at 7031 Douglas Avenue, the former GreenState Credit Union building, walking residents through the zoning changes needed to actually allow the density the master plan calls for. If you missed it, the underlying question hasn't gone away: current zoning doesn't permit what's been drawn on paper, and the rezoning process is still working its way through city staff and the planning commission.

Then on September 17, 2026, the Urbandale Chamber hosts Sample Urbandale, its annual business celebration, which will include the Downtown Urbandale Champion of the Year award, a recognition the chamber only started because enough people are now paying attention to who's investing in that corridor to make the award meaningful.

Dudley, the auto shop owner, put it plainly after last October's block party: it's early, but positive change is already happening downtown. That's a fair summary. The buildings aren't there yet. The land under them already changed hands.

Where This Leaves You

None of this means Downtown Urbandale is finished, and none of it means every corner of that corridor will look different next year. What it does mean is that the slow, invisible part, land assembly, zoning groundwork, infrastructure funding, is largely behind the city now. The visible part, the part you'll actually drive through and notice, starts with paint on Douglas Avenue this year and a rezoning decision sometime after it.

If you're curious how any of this touches property values, permitted uses, or what it might mean for a specific block you're watching, that's a conversation worth having before the buildings show up and the questions get more expensive to answer. Christopher Lewis has been tracking Central Iowa's suburban growth corridors for years, Urbandale included, and is always glad to talk through what's actually happening versus what's still just a rendering. Let's Connect.