Two years ago, Celina broke ground on a parking garage. Not because the city needed more parking in the abstract, but because the actual reason people already loved about Celina, the Square, had run out of room to hold them. This fall, that same stretch of downtown is getting company. A private developer is bringing $15 million and 55,000 square feet to the block next door. A new dining node has opened on the west side with a coffee house and a pizza place people are already driving to on purpose. And Preston Road, which for years has just been the street people used to leave town for errands, is turning into a place to run those errands without leaving.
None of these four projects, the garage, the private downtown build, the west-side dining node, and the Preston Road corridor, are related on paper. They have different funding sources, different developers, different timelines. But look at them together and they answer the same question: where does a fast-growing small town put the people it keeps attracting, once the one place they all want to be can't hold any more of them.
Why the Square Ran Out of Room First
Celina's population roughly tripled over the fifteen years leading into a 2024 CBS Texas report, crossing 30,000 residents, with the city's own long-range planning pointing toward a buildout north of 378,000. That kind of growth doesn't distribute itself evenly. It piles up downtown, because downtown is where the Square, the restaurants, and the seasonal festivals already were.
The city's answer, before any private developer got involved, was infrastructure. On October 15, 2024, Celina broke ground on a Downtown Center anchored by a 26,209-square-foot library and a four-story parking garage with close to 400 spaces, all part of a roughly $93 million project funded through Certificate of Obligation bonds. City Manager Robert Ranc framed the project at the time as a direct response to a question residents kept asking: how does a place stay a small town while it grows this fast. The garage and library were the public half of the answer.
What Trackside Junction Actually Adds
The private half arrived this July. On July 14, 2026, the city and the Celina Economic Development Corporation announced Trackside Junction, a mixed-use project from Nack Development, the same firm behind Frisco's Rail District and Old Town Lewisville, set for the empty parking lot at 111 W. Pecan St.
The headline number is $15 million in private investment. The more useful number is what that money actually builds. Trackside Junction is two buildings totaling 55,000 square feet, but only 15,000 of that is retail and restaurant space. The first building runs four stories and 40,000 square feet, with 10,000 square feet of ground-floor retail and three full floors of office space above it. The second building adds another 5,000 square feet of ground-floor retail with residential units stacked on top. That ratio matters. Most of what's being built isn't storefronts people visit occasionally. It's office space and housing that puts people downtown on a random Tuesday afternoon, not just during Oktoberfest.
The financing shows the city treating this as connective tissue, not a standalone project. Celina is selling the $1 million Pecan Street parcel to Nack for $1, adding a $1.7 million grant from Tax Increment Reinvestment Zone No. 11, and kicking in $350,000 more through the CEDC. TIRZ No. 11 was created back in 2017 specifically to funnel future downtown property tax revenue back into downtown improvements, and this is the first time the city has used it to back a named project. In exchange, Nack has committed to breaking ground by the start of 2027, finishing both buildings by mid-2028, covering some traffic improvements, and adding a flashing crosswalk across Louisiana Drive pending state approval. If those milestones slip, the land reverts to the city. City council approved the incentive package 5-2, with the two dissenting members objecting to a specific parking lease provision rather than the project itself.
The Three Zones, Side by Side
| Where | What's Landing | What It Actually Solves |
|---|---|---|
| Downtown / Trackside Junction | Two mixed-use buildings from Nack Development, 15,000 sq ft of new retail plus office and residential space above | Extends foot traffic past the Square itself, along Louisiana Drive, and adds people who live and work downtown year-round |
| The Creeks at Celina | Haraz Coffee House and Capo's Pizza & Pasta, developed by Weitzman around a six-acre pond | Gives Light Farms and Sutton Fields a walkable coffee-and-dinner option that doesn't require a Preston Road drive |
| Preston Road corridor | Costco, Academy Sports + Outdoors, Pickleman's Gourmet Cafe, Blaze Pizza | Closes the long-running gap where Celina had rooftops but sent residents to Frisco or McKinney for basic errands |
The West Side Got Its Own Living Room
The Creeks at Celina sits at the northwest corner of the Dallas North Tollway and Frontier Parkway, a 28,000-square-foot district built around a six-acre pond with restaurant patios facing the water. It's positioned as the daily-needs stop for Light Farms and Sutton Fields, sitting about a half mile east of the newer H-E-B. Its two current anchors are Haraz Coffee House, a Yemeni coffee concept built around beans sourced from the Haraz mountains, and Capo's Pizza & Pasta. For anyone living on the west side, this is the first real answer to a problem that's existed since those neighborhoods filled in: there was housing, but there wasn't anywhere within walking distance to sit down for an hour.
Preston Road Quit Being Just a Commute
The east side got its version of the same fix, at a bigger scale. Costco's Celina warehouse, a 158,000-square-foot store with a full pharmacy, optical center, hearing aid clinic, and a fuel station, opened at Preston Road and Ownsby Parkway on August 26, 2026, just days before this was written. It's not opening in isolation. Academy Sports + Outdoors is bringing a nearly 64,000-square-foot store to 3525 S. Preston Road the same year. Pickleman's Gourmet Cafe, opened by Celina resident Jesse Murphy, who also runs the McKinney location and brought the first Pickleman's to Texas, is landing on the same stretch. Blaze Pizza is filling in at The Crossing at Moore Farms nearby.
For years, the joke among Celina residents was that the rooftops arrived faster than the errands did. You bought the house in one of the new subdivisions and then drove to Frisco for the warehouse club, Little Elm for lumber, McKinney for sporting goods. This stretch of Preston Road, opening within roughly the same few months, is what closing that gap actually looks like on the ground.
Back on the Square itself, turnover is already happening ahead of Trackside Junction breaking ground. The old Jimbo's Pizza space at 501 W. Walnut is becoming Nowhere Bar, a project from Taylor Witt and Katie Dunn, who also own the Little Wooden Penguin, built around burgers, shuffleboard, and a redone patio. It's a small addition next to a $15 million one, but it's proof the Square's storefronts are already being reworked, not just waiting on a bigger project to finish.
The Calendar Was Always Going to Get Loud
None of this changes what already brings people downtown. It just changes what happens after they get there. Celina's fall calendar hasn't slowed down and won't:
- Friday Night Market, recurring on the Square through the fall with vendors and food
- Celina Oktoberfest, October 3, with a keg tapping and the annual Dachshund Derby
- Beware! of the Square, October 24, the city's Halloween event, with trick-or-treating and haunted attractions filling the historic Square
- Troubadour Festival, back at Old Celina Park this November, a newer North Texas barbecue and music event
- Christmas on the Square, December 2, with a tree lighting and holiday parades
The city's own special events calendar runs more than 25 gatherings a year and draws over 100,000 attendees annually by the city's own count. That volume, landing on the same few blocks year after year, is the actual constraint this stretch of construction, public and private, downtown and out on Preston Road, is built to relieve.
The short version: Celina isn't just adding new places to eat and shop this fall. It's finally building enough room around its own popularity that a Tuesday coffee run, a Friday market night, and an October Saturday on the Square don't all have to compete for the same handful of blocks.
If you're weighing what any of this means for a specific block, a specific commute, or a specific property you're watching in Celina, Collinsville, or anywhere else across Collin, Denton, Cooke, or Grayson counties, that's exactly the kind of on-the-ground read Texas Homes & Land works through with clients every day. Let's Make It Happen.
