Drive south on Broadway past Toll 49 on any weekday afternoon and you'll pass two kinds of construction. One is a chain-link fence around a flat, cleared lot with a glossy rendering bolted to a post, promising something enormous is coming. The other is an actual crew inside an actual storefront, running conduit and hanging drywall for a store that will open on a specific date because a permit says so.
South Tyler has both right now, and they are not the same kind of news, even though local coverage tends to treat them identically. One category is reliable because it is boring: a filing with the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation, a city facility directory entry, a dollar figure and a completion date. The other category is exciting because it is vague, and it has been vague for a long time.
If you live here, this distinction is worth knowing, because it tells you which headlines to act on and which ones to file away for another year.
Two Clocks, One Corridor
The clearest example sits on opposite sides of South Broadway Avenue near Toll 49. On one side is the Village at Cumberland Park, the 700,000-square-foot outdoor center that opened its first phase back in 2014. Directly across the street is the Parkside Development, a proposed 600,000-square-foot project from the Genecov Group at 8851 S. Broadway Avenue, first unveiled in January 2025.
Here is what the first eleven months of coverage on Parkside produced: a site plan, a location, a square footage figure, and, as of December 2025, a description of "anchor spaces" and pad sites with frontage on Broadway. That's the same non-specific language the project launched with back in January 2025, when the original announcement candidly admitted:
"We don't know yet what businesses will occupy those spaces."
Eleven months apart, the two write-ups say the same thing. That's not a criticism of the project. Big developments take years, and Cumberland Park itself spent roughly six years in planning before its first store opened. It's a reminder that a rendering and a press release are marketing materials, not a moving date, and it's worth watching whether Parkside has finally landed a named tenant since that last update.
Compare that to what's been happening a few miles away with much less fanfare.
What's Actually Opening This Season
Three separate threads of paperwork, each filed with a real state agency or a real construction schedule, have quietly delivered more concrete change to South Tyler in the past twelve months than any single mega-development announcement.
At Broadway Square Mall, Sephora is returning after a legal dispute ended its 15-year in-store partnership with JCPenney back in 2022, sending its shop-in-shop presence over to Kohl's in the meantime. A state filing put construction at a March 2026 start with completion by early summer. If that timeline held, the beauty retailer should already be operating on its own inside the mall by the time you're reading this.
Two doors down that same corridor, the mall is also backfilling space left by Weird & Different and Attic Salt, two stores that closed out their leases. J.Crew and lululemon are taking their place, with build-out completion dated to early July for J.Crew and August 20 for lululemon. One of those dates has already passed. The other is a little over a week away as of this writing.
Old Bullard Road has its own quiet momentum. Lalo's Mexican Dogos, known around East Texas for its bacon-wrapped hot dogs and asada fries, expanded into the former Breakers Seafood building at 5106 Old Bullard Road for a full dine-in location, adding fajitas, enchiladas and margaritas to a menu that started as a food truck concept. A few blocks over, the Brass Tap, a craft beer bar and restaurant planned for 5878 Old Bullard Rd, was slated to break ground last fall.
Along Old Jacksonville Highway, the fitness scene picked up a new anchor too. F45 Training's Legacy Trail location, sited between Bruno's and Hagens Lighting, is set to open this fall with expanded studio space and the addition of FS8 Pilates and Yoga. Nearby, Wallis Dermatology Associates began seeing patients at its new clinic on Three Lakes Parkway back in early February, offering both medical and cosmetic skin care. And on Troup Highway, Firestone Complete Auto Care has a 6,769-square-foot facility under construction.
None of this required a press conference or a rendering. It required a permit.
The Table That Tells the Real Story
| Project | First Announced | Status as of This Writing | Named Tenants |
|---|---|---|---|
| Parkside Development (8851 S. Broadway) | January 2025 | Still described as unconfirmed "anchor spaces" as of December 2025 | None publicly named |
| Sephora, Broadway Square Mall | Filing reported September 2025 | Construction slated to start March 2026, open by early summer | Sephora, confirmed |
| J.Crew & lululemon, Broadway Square Mall | Filing reported February 2026 | J.Crew completed early July; lululemon due August 20 | Both confirmed |
| Legacy Trail Phase II | Long-planned city project | Officially opened January 2026 | N/A, public infrastructure |
Notice what separates the top row from the bottom three. Everything below Parkside came with a name attached before the concrete was even poured. Parkside, for all its scale, still hasn't.
The Trail That Hit Its Deadline While Nobody Was Watching
The least glamorous item on that list is also the one that actually shipped on schedule with the least public fuss. Legacy Trail, the paved path that already runs along Old Jacksonville Highway through the heart of South Tyler on the old Cotton Belt railroad grade, got a second phase in January 2026, according to the City of Tyler's own facility directory. The new stretch is a 2-mile, 12-foot-wide concrete path running from the site of the planned Stewart Park north through W.E. Winters Park and ending at Peete Elementary School.
There was no rendering campaign for this one. No "coming soon" teaser cycle. The city said it would build a specific trail segment, and the segment now exists, connecting to a system that already gives South Tyler residents miles of shaded, flat concrete to walk, run or bike without touching a street.
Reading the Next Headline
None of this means the flashy projects are fake or that Parkside won't eventually open with real stores inside it. It means the two categories of news move at different speeds, and confusing them leads to a lot of premature excitement about a shopping center that might not open for years.
The tell is almost always in the language. A project described with square footage, "anchor spaces," and phrases like high-profile retail options is still in the pitch stage. A project described with a filed dollar amount, a start date, and a named business is already moving. Sephora's filing came with a construction start date and a completion window. Parkside's coverage, eleven months after launch, still didn't have a tenant list.
If you want to know what your errands will actually look like next quarter, skip the rendering and look for the permit.
South Tyler keeps changing in both loud and quiet ways, and knowing which is which is its own kind of local literacy. If you're weighing what any of this means for your own address in South Tyler, or you're simply curious how these shifts might affect what your home is worth in this market, The Tyler Lifestyle is happy to talk it through. Schedule a consultation whenever you're ready.
