Grimes Has Been Growing Outward for Years. This Summer, Main Street Finally Caught Up.

If you have lived in Grimes for more than a season, you already know where the growth has been going. Highway 141. The Hy-Vee Multiplex. The 200-acre Hope District, where a Tru by Hilton and a Chipotle moved in and an Outside Scoop ice cream shop was slated to follow by the end of last year. That is the Grimes story everyone tells: fast, outward, retail-shaped.

This year, a different story showed up four blocks over on Main Street. A lion statue named Leo took up residence in a reopened neighborhood park. A mural went up on the side of the Kupka Real Estate building, the first public art the old downtown has ever had. The city's original library came down in March 2026 to make room for something else entirely. None of it moves the needle the way 400 new apartments under construction in the Hope District does. But it is the first proof in years that reinvestment reached the four blocks Grimes actually grew up around, not just the corridor it has been expanding into.

The Growth You Already Knew About

The numbers behind the outward growth are real. Grimes' 2025 special census put the population at 17,809, up 15.7% from 15,392 in 2020, and the city's own economic development director has said she expects that number to reach around 27,000 by 2030. More than 5,000 housing units have been proposed since 2020 alone. That kind of pace is why the Hope District, the mixed-use area built around the Hy-Vee Multiplex, already has 250,000 square feet of retail built and 400 apartments under construction, with brokers telling the Business Record that the Multiplex alone drew nearly 600,000 visits from almost 150,000 unique visitors over the twelve months ending in October 2025.

"We can safely say Grimes is at a turning point," Katie Lord, the city's director of economic development, told the Business Record in October 2025. She meant the Hope District pitch to developers. But the same line applies, maybe more, to the four blocks she and the city had mostly left alone until this year.

The Blocks That Got Skipped

Those four blocks are the Governors District, Grimes' original downtown, founded in 1882 and named for Iowa's third governor. The city last did a formal assessment of it in 2009. It took until 2025, when the City Council named downtown revitalization a priority, for another one to happen. Sixteen years is a long gap for a neighborhood that sits a few hundred yards from a splash pad and a public library.

The 2025 assessment ran through the Iowa Economic Development Authority's Downtown Resource Center, with consultant Dennis Reynolds of Reynolds Urban Design leading the planning sessions. The city collected 163 survey responses, from a high school sophomore to a 97-year-old woman who once served as Grimes' city clerk. IEDA's Jeff Geerts told attendees at a May 2025 meeting that the recurring theme was "modern amenities with vintage appeal," and the recommendations that came out of it were modest by design: wider sidewalks for outdoor restaurant seating, better use of alleys for parking, new wayfinding signage, a defined gateway into downtown.

None of that required a groundbreaking. Some of it was already happening on its own. A developer bought the old fueling station at First and Main, tore it down, and put up a new office building. A single-family home a block off Main was converted into a wine and bourbon bar in 2024. A property the city picked up through nuisance abatement is being turned into a mixed-use building with ground-floor retail and apartments above. A 17-unit apartment and townhome project got its site plan approved for the corner of Southeast Fourth and Main.

The First Thing That Actually Got Built

Out of everything the assessment recommended, the first project to actually go up was the smallest: a mural on the side of the Kupka Real Estate building, painted by local artist and Dallas Center-Grimes graduate Courtney Garcia, who worked through concepts with DC-G high school students in the fall of 2025. Business owner Allison Kupka told the Business Record that older residents and teenagers wanted the same thing out of it for different reasons. The adults liked the idea of public art downtown. The students wanted somewhere to take photos.

It is a small thing to build an entire narrative around, and that is the point. After sixteen years between downtown assessments, the first tangible output was a mural, not a building. The city says it hopes to start on the bigger recommendations, benches, plantings, bike racks, in 2027, with a longer-term look at downtown parking and lighting still to come.

The Parks Are Trading Up

Two blocks of city park have done more to change how downtown Grimes actually feels this year than the mural has. Lions Park reopened this summer with a new playground, a pickleball court, and a statue the city named Leo the Lion, the first named landmark the old downtown has had in a long time. A few minutes away, Waterworks Park's splash pad opened for the season on May 25 and has been running daily from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m., including on the Fourth of July.

Waterworks Park is also where the city's next real investment is landing. Demolition of the old Grimes library began in March 2026 to clear space for a new $8.5 million public administration building at the corner of James Street and Highway 44, set to open in 2027. It will combine staff currently split between City Hall and the nearly 100-year-old Grimes Community Complex, a building the city says needs roughly $10 million in structural, HVAC, and sanitary sewer repairs even though it still draws about 80,000 visitors a year for programming and events. City Hall itself is slated to come down too, once Highway 44 gets its own expansion, though the city has not set a timeline for that yet.

What the Road Crews Were Doing the Whole Time

None of this happened in a quiet corner of town. S James Street, the road connecting downtown to the South Sports Complex, has been under construction in phases for years, and the city's own project updates call it, without much patience left, "this multi-year project." This year alone it closed in March for a six to eight week stretch, reopened by June, then triggered a two-month closure on SE 19th Street while crews widened the intersection. A short section closed again in late July for a storm sewer crossing near SE 19th. The city's project updates have tracked the work phase by phase for anyone who wanted to follow along.

Governors Days, the festival named for the same historic district the mural and the assessment are trying to revive, went off as planned on June 6, 2026, at the South James Street grounds, fireworks, a bags tournament, and food vendors like Smokin' Big Dawgs and Thai Street Food, just days after S James Street itself had reopened from its latest closure. It is a strange thing to celebrate a district's name while the actual district a few blocks away is still waiting on benches and bike racks, but that is where Grimes sat this year: one foot in the growth everyone already knows about, one foot finally back on Main Street.

The Highway 141 corridor has had its own kind of validation too. Destination Grille, out on E 1st Street, showed up in a Des Moines Register roundup in January 2026 as a metro-wide "hidden gem" and has had a booth at the Iowa State Fair since 2024, where its lobster corn dog was a Best New Food finalist that year. That is the kind of recognition the retail side of Grimes has been racking up for a while. Main Street is only now starting to get its own.

Grimes is not choosing between the two directions of growth. It never really had to. But if you have watched this town add restaurants and retail along Highway 141 for years while downtown sat with the same handful of buildings, this was the year that finally changed, one mural and one lion statue at a time.

If watching Grimes change block by block has you curious what it actually means for home values or timing a move here, the team at Boutique Real Estate knows this market street by street and is happy to walk through it with you.