"Backing out of our driveway is tough because you're always backing on to St. Albans." That's how one North Hills homeowner described his corner of Midtown Raleigh to a CBS 17 reporter earlier this year, and it sums up the odd holding pattern this neighborhood has been stuck in for almost two years. Ask anyone who lives near St. Albans Drive what's happening at North Hills Innovation District and you'll get some version of the same answer: it's always almost done.
In April 2025, local news cameras showed up to film what was billed as the last stretch of construction on the district, with reporters told the whole project would wrap by that fall. Fall 2025 came and went. Instead of a ribbon-cutting, Kane Realty broke ground on Tributary, a six-story apartment building that's the leading edge of a new 28-acre expansion, and released renderings for additional office towers, a hotel, and another greenway segment. A few months after that, the city separately cleared zoning for towers as tall as 37 stories on an adjacent site near Six Forks and Lassiter Mill roads. The finish line didn't get crossed. It moved, twice.
That's the real story here, and it matters if you actually live nearby and just want to know where to grab dinner without driving to Glenwood South. So here's the version that skips the renderings and press releases: what's open at North Hills right now, what's still just a plan on paper, and why the gap between those two lists keeps getting wider instead of narrower.
What You Can Actually Walk Into This Month
Strip away the announcements and a handful of NHID additions are genuinely open for business as of this fall. Standard Beer + Food and Benchwarmers Bagels, the two stand-alone restaurants Kane Realty has been promoting since that April 2025 news segment, have both settled into their space along St. Albans Drive, according to Raleigh Magazine's food coverage from earlier this month. Standard's new location is a full-service dining room with a raw bar, a wood-fired grill, and a curated natural wine list, built by the same team behind the original on Person Street. Benchwarmers brought pizza, wine, and beer to go with its bagels.
A few doors down in the Park District, Velvet Taco has moved into the former World of Beer space at the base of Captrust Tower for its first Raleigh location, and Barking Dog, the pet-friendly restaurant with two New York City locations, has taken its first North Carolina spot in the same district. Over in the Main District, Jubala Coffee opened its second North Hills location this year, its fifth shop in Raleigh overall, tucked between Alo Yoga and Gorjana at 4114 Center at North Hills. Face Foundrié, a facial bar the developer targeted for a summer 2026 opening, has settled into the Park District now that summer has come and gone.
None of this is speculative. These are places you can drive to today and order a coffee or a taco. That's worth saying plainly, because it's easy to lose track of what's real when the same development keeps generating new renderings every few months.
What's Still Just a Rendering
Here's the other list, the one that explains why North Hills never seems to run out of news. Tributary, the six-story, 332-unit apartment building Kane Realty broke ground on in February 2026, isn't expected to open until spring 2028, more than two years after the first shovel went into the ground. That's longer than the entire window between the "few more months" promise residents heard in April 2025 and today.
Tributary sits at the leading edge of a roughly 28-acre expansion pushing the district closer to I-440 and Wake Forest Road. The developer's newest renderings for that expansion show additional office towers, a hotel with a rooftop bar, and another private greenway segment, though Kane Realty has said groundbreaking on those next pieces likely won't happen until 2027. A new golf and social club, also announced this year, is slated to open before the end of 2026.
Separately, the city has cleared zoning on an adjacent parcel near Six Forks Road and Lassiter Mill Road that allows buildings as tall as 37 stories. That rezoning caps the area's overall density at roughly 3 million square feet while permitting individual towers anywhere from 10 to 37 stories, though no construction start date has been announced for that site.
Meanwhile, Tower 5, the 17-story, 342,000-square-foot office building that delivered in 2025, is still filling up. Millennium Private Wealth announced in May 2026 that it would lease about 4,000 square feet there for its first North Carolina office, a small but telling sign that the district's office space is drawing tenants well after the building's ribbon-cutting.
The pattern is consistent. Every time one piece of North Hills nears completion, Kane Realty announces the next one before the paint dries on the last.
Why It Keeps Growing Instead of Finishing
This isn't an accident or a sign of a stalled project. It's the business model. Kane Realty has described its approach as building upward rather than outward, and the district's own materials talk about designing around Big Branch Creek and the wetlands that run through the property, which is why so much of the recent construction news involves greenways and pedestrian bridges rather than parking decks. Two of those bridges now connect Makers Alley to Standard, and Standard to Tower 5 and Benchwarmers, letting people walk between food, retail, and office space without touching a car. A separate $450,000 riparian buffer project used quarried stone step pools and native plants to stabilize the creek bed running through the district.
That kind of infrastructure takes longer to build than a strip of storefronts, and it explains why NHID has moved in phases since its first piece, Vine North Hills, opened back in 2021. Channel House followed in 2023, Makers Alley in 2024, and Tower 5 and St. Albans Lofts in 2025. Each phase has effectively financed and justified the next one. There was never a single finish line. There's a rolling one, and it keeps resetting.
The Trade a Walkable District Makes
Which brings us back to that homeowner backing out of his driveway onto St. Albans Drive. His frustration is real, and it's the flip side of the same walkability the developer keeps advertising: more people living, working, and eating within a few blocks of each other means more cars on a road that wasn't built to move them.
But the traffic story is more complicated than it feels from behind the wheel. NCDOT data cited by WRAL this spring showed that traffic volumes on many roads near North Hills are actually lower today than when the original North Hills district first opened, even though the area has expanded significantly since then. That's a genuinely useful data point if you're trying to decide whether the daily backup near St. Albans is a permanent condition or a temporary side effect of construction traffic layered on top of normal use.
The bigger fix, a citywide Walkable Midtown Plan that would redesign Six Forks Road itself, was approved by Raleigh City Council back in 2020 and still has no construction start date. Emile Hartman of the Midtown Raleigh Alliance has said the plan needs state and federal funding to move forward, which means the pedestrian bridges inside NHID are solving a problem the surrounding street grid hasn't caught up to yet.
How to Actually Use North Hills Right Now
If you live in the area, the practical takeaway is simple: stop waiting for an announcement that says the district is finished, because it isn't coming. Standard and Benchwarmers are open along St. Albans Drive for dinner. Velvet Taco and Barking Dog are settled into the Park District. Jubala's second North Hills location is pulling espresso in the Main District. Makers Alley is worth a slow walk if you haven't crossed either pedestrian bridge yet, since that's the fastest way to see how the district connects without getting back in your car.
What you shouldn't do is hold your breath for Tributary, the hotel, or the golf club. Those are years out, and by the time they open, Kane Realty will likely have announced something else. That's not a flaw in the plan. It's the plan.
North Hills has become one of the more closely watched pockets of Raleigh precisely because it keeps changing shape, and for homeowners nearby, that means property values, foot traffic, and daily commutes are all still settling into whatever this district ultimately becomes. If you're trying to figure out what that shift means for a home you already own here, or you're weighing whether now is the right moment to make a move in Midtown Raleigh, Irene Higginson has been tracking this market closely and is glad to talk through what you're seeing on the ground.
