Drive down Liberty Street past the antique shops and you'll pass a building that used to sell nails, lumber, and paint. Jim's Hardware sat there for years, one of the businesses that gave downtown Montgomery its working, unpolished character. Then Home Depot arrived in October 2024, and within months the store was gone. So were Ace Hardware and McCoy's Building Supply, both casualties of the same big-box arrival, according to Mayor Sara Countryman.
That building isn't sitting empty for long. City leaders have architectural and engineering work underway to turn the old Jim's Hardware location into a new municipal complex, bringing city hall and city services into the historic core. It's a small detail buried in a much larger story about downtown Montgomery's construction season, but it's the detail that makes sense of everything else happening around it.
The Town Is Less Than Half Built
If you've noticed more orange cones, more surveying flags, and more conversation about downtown parking than usual, there's a reason that has nothing to do with any single project. Mayor Countryman told Community Impact in March 2026 that Montgomery is only about 43% built out. When fully developed, the city expects to house 20,000 people across five square miles. What residents are living through right now isn't the finished version of downtown. It's the early middle of a much longer build-out.
That framing matters because it changes how you read the individual pieces. A single road project or a single new grocery store can feel like an isolated inconvenience. Viewed against the 43% figure, they read differently: this is what the first half of a town's growth looks like while it's happening, not a series of unrelated disruptions.
"Our downtown is truly our crown jewel and our heartbeat, and by giving her a face-lift, getting ordinances that are current and modern will also help these businesses and future growth," Mayor Countryman said.
Who Is Actually Paying for the Growth
Here's the part that doesn't show up when you're stuck behind a McCown Street work truck. In September 2025, Montgomery City Council approved roughly a 17% increase to the city's water and wastewater impact fees. Those fees are charged to new developments, not to households already living in town. It's a deliberate choice to have new growth cover more of its own infrastructure cost rather than shifting that burden onto existing residents through higher property taxes.
That approach appears to be working on the revenue side too. City sales tax revenue climbed 153.59% between 2020 and 2025, according to Texas Comptroller figures cited by Community Impact. That kind of growth in sales tax collection, largely driven by new commercial development, gives a small city room to fund upgrades without leaning as hard on residents who were here before the growth started.
So the mechanism behind Montgomery's face-lift isn't mysterious once you see it laid out: growth pays impact fees, growth generates sales tax, and that combination is what's funding the road work and the building projects you can actually see from your car.
The Projects You Can See From the Street
Three pieces of that funding are visible right now if you know where to look:
- McCown Street. An estimated $2.3 million project funded by the Montgomery Economic Development Corporation, aimed at easing traffic and improving walkability downtown. Planning is also underway around the Montgomery Community Center grounds, intended to make the layout safer during busy event days.
- The H-E-B at Highway 105 and FM 2854. This is the 127,186-square-foot store residents have been hearing about since 2025, an estimated $30 million project on land H-E-B has owned since 2014. One early estimate had it wrapped up by late summer 2026. The most recent update from city officials, in March of this year, points instead to the fourth quarter.
- Academy Sports on C.B. Stewart Drive, arriving near Ransom's Steakhouse & Saloon.
None of these are finished yet. All three are the visible edge of the same growth-funds-growth approach described above, and all three explain why downtown has felt more like a construction zone than a finished postcard this year.
What a Saturday Downtown Still Looks Like
None of this construction has paused the parts of downtown that make it feel like home. The First Saturday Market still runs every month at 14420 Liberty Street, a mix of local artisans, fresh produce, and the kind of small vendors that don't show up in a big-box parking lot. The Lone Star Street Dance returns on November 7 this year, with live music and dancing in the historic district the way it has for seasons before. Families circling the block for trick-or-treating downtown have that penciled in for October 24.
The restaurant scene downtown hasn't slowed either. Petite Suzette and The Republic Grille remain fixtures for a sit-down dinner. Moose & Oak is still the newer spot people are talking about. H Wines on Liberty Street is a quieter option if you want a glass of Texas wine without the crowd. None of that changes because a grocery store three miles away is running behind an earlier estimate.
That's worth sitting with for a second. The texture that makes Montgomery feel like Montgomery, the market, the dance, the family-owned tables, hasn't been touched by any of this. What's changing is the infrastructure underneath it, not the town's actual character.
The Building Is the Point
Come back to Jim's Hardware. The store that Home Depot's arrival helped push out is about to become the place where the city council that approved the impact fee hikes, that's funding the McCown Street work, and that's tracking the H-E-B timeline will actually sit and do its business. The building that big-box growth displaced becomes the seat of government overseeing more big-box growth. It's not an accident of scheduling. It's a small, specific illustration of how a town this size is trying to absorb rapid change without losing the parts of itself that made people want to live there in the first place.
If you've been wondering whether all the orange cones and the new construction fences downtown add up to something coherent, they do. Montgomery isn't midway through a random pile of projects. It's about 43% of the way through a plan that pays for its own growth and hands the old hardware store back to the town in a new form.
If you're weighing what any of this means for your own property, or you're curious how downtown Montgomery's growth might affect home values in your part of town, Eve Kneller can walk you through it with a free CMA and consultation built around what's actually happening on the ground here, not a generic market snapshot.
