Drive the frontage road between Beltway 8 and Bunker Hill this fall and you will pass three active construction zones inside a two-mile stretch. A cycling shop with a moving truck parked out front. A shuttered restaurant with paper still taped over its windows. Orange barrels ringing what used to be the Sears wing at Memorial City Mall. None of this reads as connected if you are just driving through. It reads like a neighborhood in the middle of an ordinary churn, the kind every retail corridor goes through every few years.
It is not ordinary churn. It is one company.
One Buyer, Not Six Separate Stories
For twenty years, Memorial City and CityCentre were built by two different developers who happened to share a highway exit. MetroNational, a family-owned firm whose founder Joseph Johnson bought 200 acres off Gessner Road in 1959 and started developing Memorial City in 1962, built the mall side. Midway built CityCentre starting in 2009, a 47-acre district that went on to win the Urban Land Institute's Development of the Decade award. They were neighbors, not partners.
That stopped being true in the last twelve months. In August 2025, MetroNational bought the vacant 442,000-square-foot office tower at 990 Town & Country Boulevard, the former Marathon Oil headquarters, in its largest acquisition in a decade. Two months later, it bought the 309,144-square-foot retail portion of CityCentre itself from Midway. In May 2026, it acquired The Moran, CityCentre's 244-room hotel, along with the real estate under two of the district's anchor restaurants, Daily Gather and Yard House. Midway kept the office towers and apartments. Everything a visitor actually walks through, shops in, or eats at now answers to the same landlord as the mall across the highway.
| Date | Acquisition | Size |
|---|---|---|
| Aug 2025 | 990 Town & Country Blvd (former Marathon Oil tower) | 442,000 sq ft |
| Oct 2025 | CityCentre retail portion (from Midway) | 309,144 sq ft |
| May 2026 | The Moran CityCentre hotel + Daily Gather/Yard House real estate | 244 rooms |
This is the fact that makes the rest of the year's changes make sense. Once you know one company now sets the tenant strategy for both sides of the highway, the moves that looked like scattered restaurant news start reading as a single plan.
Why a Bike Shop Moving Isn't a Business Failing
Epic Cycles is leaving its CityCentre storefront this year for a new space at Greenside, the retail development going up on the north side of I-10 at 1085 Gessner Road. A storefront relocation two miles down the same road usually signals a lease that didn't get renewed or a location that stopped working. Here it means something narrower: the shop is moving from one MetroNational-owned address to another. Same landlord, different building.
The design credit tells the same story from a different angle. Michael Hsu Office of Architecture designed Greenside, and Radom Capital, the developer now steering both Greenside's leasing and CityCentre's retail refresh, built its reputation on Montrose Collective and Heights Mercantile, two districts with a nearly identical mix of fast-casual food, a boutique fitness studio, and a day spa. When Greenside's tenant list reads like a smaller, west-side copy of those two, that is not a coincidence. It is the same team running the same playbook on a new site.
What Actually Opens This Fall
Greenside is a 35,000-square-foot conversion of three old warehouses that broke ground in April 2025, next door to an already-established hub anchored by Kirby Ice House, Mia's Table, and Torchy's Tacos. The tenant list, confirmed across two announcements this year, is aimed at Q4 2026 openings:
- Honest Mary's, an Austin-based fast-casual bowl concept, opening its second Houston location
- Leemoo, a health bar with smoothies and açaí bowls, also expanding from a Montrose Collective location
- Hiatus, a day spa expanding from its Tanglewood outpost
- [solidcore], a fitness studio
- Merit Coffee, a San Antonio-based roaster making its first push into Houston
- Tifa Chocolate & Gelato, a small-batch gelato and chocolate shop
- Epic Cycles, relocating from its current CityCentre storefront
- Swish Dental, occupying a 3,132-square-foot space
- Original ChopShop, a juice and protein-bowl chain set to open inside the development's office building
Across the highway, CityCentre spent part of this month leaning into the idea that its restaurants are one collective rather than a row of competitors. On August 13, the district ran A Taste of CityCentre, a foodie crawl where a single ticket got attendees tastings from nine participating restaurants. That kind of cross-promotion, spanning nearly half the district's dining tenants under one ticket, is easier to pull off when one owner is coordinating the marketing calendar for the whole property.
The Construction You Will Actually Notice
The visible disruption this fall and winter centers on Memorial City Mall's former Sears wing. Sears anchored the mall when it opened in 1966, closed there in 2018, and the building itself came down in 2020. MetroNational filed for a new phase of demolition this spring, an $8.8 million project covering roughly 216,000 square feet of interior space and 190,000 square feet of exterior space, referred to in filings as 400 Gessner-North Site Phase 2. Work broke ground in May 2026. The parking lot and access improvements, the part most current shoppers will notice first through restriped lots and rerouted entries, are scheduled to wrap by January 2027. The larger interior demolition and rebuild finishes in April 2027.
The mall stays open through all of it. Macy's, Dillard's, JCPenney, the Target across the street, the AMC theater, and the food court on the east side keep normal hours. Expect temporary signage and periodic detours near the south side of the property through the winter, but nothing that closes the mall itself.
The Restaurant Reshuffle, Read the Right Way
Once you see the single-owner pattern, the restaurant news from the past year sorts itself by side of the highway rather than by random chance. Near the mall, The Burger Joint opened its fourth location, a 4,300-square-foot restaurant with a 1,500-square-foot patio, on February 26, 2026, joining locations in the Heights, Montrose, and Friendswood. State Fare Kitchen & Bar, the original location near Gateway Memorial City, closed after service on May 31, 2026, with its owner, Culinary Khancepts, describing plans to reopen the concept as a larger "social dining destination" with games, details still pending as of that closure.
At Town & Country Village, the pattern skews toward sit-down and upscale. The Henry, a nearly 7,000-square-foot restaurant from Arizona-based Fox Restaurant Concepts with a 1,700-square-foot patio, opened there in 2025, and a second location is already planned for the Central Park Post Oak development. Truluck's Ocean's Finest Seafood and Crab is slated to open there in early 2027, its third Greater Houston location. Flower Child, a made-from-scratch, diet-flexible fast-casual concept, opened in the same shopping center in January 2025.
North side gets fast-casual and wellness. South side gets sit-down and seafood. That is not two neighborhoods evolving separately. That is one company sorting its tenant mix by property type across a portfolio it only fully assembled this year.
The Part Nobody's Buying
While the ownership map of the retail corridor keeps redrawing itself, the green space threading through the middle of it has stayed exactly the same. Terry Hershey Park runs roughly ten to eleven miles along Buffalo Bayou between Beltway 8 and Highway 6, with a network of named routes: the paved Quail Trail on the north bank, the single-track Anthills Trail on the south bank favored by mountain bikers, and the Blue Jay and Mockingbird trails that connect the two. The park carries the name of Terry Hershey, a Houston conservationist who in 1966 pushed back against the Army Corps of Engineers' plan to strip and channelize the bayou's banks near her neighborhood, a fight that helped start the local conservation movement decades before any of the retail developments up the road existed.
Whoever owns the strip malls next year, the bayou trail is not on anyone's acquisition list. It is the one constant in a corridor where almost everything else changed hands in the past twelve months.
If you are trying to make sense of what a fast-moving corridor like this means for your own plans, or you just want a straight answer about a specific address near all this activity, The Property Joes Group knows this stretch of Houston block by block. Start Your Home Journey Today and let's talk about what Memorial actually looks like right now, not the version from three years ago.
