North Hills Has Two Retail Districts Now, and They Didn't Grow the Same Way

Stand in the parking deck at Tower 5 on a Saturday morning and North Hills looks the way it has looked for years. Office glass. A picnic table. A dog park where dogs actually run around, unbothered by the fact that a fleet of green trucks used to be the most memorable thing about this particular stretch of the neighborhood. Until late last year, this patch of ground was known mainly as the site of GFL Environmental's Raleigh office headquarters, a waste management company's front door in the middle of Midtown. It was not a place you walked to on purpose.

Keep walking past the picnic tables, though, and you'll hit a pedestrian bridge over a small creek. Cross it, and the neighborhood changes underneath your feet.

The Office Park You Didn't Know Had a Back Yard

That creek is Big Branch Creek, and it cuts through the middle of the North Hills Innovation District, the 33-acre pocket of Midtown centered near St. Albans Drive and Hardimont Road at the edge of I-440. Kane Realty built two pedestrian bridges here, one connecting the retail cluster known as Makers Alley to the restaurant Standard, another linking Standard to Benchwarmers Bagels and the storefronts beyond it. The district even has its own parking deck at 521 Church at North Hills Street and its own rideshare drop points, separate from the lots that serve the Main District and Park District shopping you already know.

For most of its life, this was an office park with landscaping. A North State Journal report on the district put it plainly: the area was a food desert until a wave of new tenants arrived over roughly the past year. What's filling in now is not a scaled-down version of the shops on Main District's sidewalks. It's a different kind of North Hills entirely.

Who's Actually Behind the Counter

Walk the boardwalk today and here's what you'll pass:

• Good Graces, an all-day market, cafe, and bar opened by North Carolina natives Haley Borden and Lindsey Bayless. It hosts mahjong nights and flower-arranging classes alongside coffee and cocktails.
• Standard Beer + Food, a second location for the local restaurant started by Cov DeRamus, John Holmes, and Blake Thompson, built out with roughly 5,600 square feet of indoor space and a 15,000-square-foot patio.
• Benchwarmers Bagels, opening its third location here in a stand-alone building, an expanded version of its original Transfer Co. Food Hall shop that also serves thick-crust pizza.
• Ky's Kandles, founded by Raleigh native and clinical researcher Kyla Smith, who turned a 2017 seashell candle hobby she'd posted on Pinterest into her first physical storefront.
• TrenLend, an in-person clothing rental concept that joined Makers Alley in late 2024.
• A Lil' R + R, a dog-lovers' shop from illustrator Emily Petrilla with a self-serve "Barkuterie" bar and regular adoption events.
• Designed For Joy, a nonprofit that employs women coming out of crisis situations to make the leather handbags, jewelry, and home goods sold in its storefront.
• HomeTurf and Hush, a cycling studio and a luxury salon's second location, both tucked into the base of Tower 5.

None of these are names you'd recognize from a national leasing directory. Borden explained the gap she and Bayless saw in North Hills before Good Graces existed:

"There wasn't a place you could come to get some work done with a coffee, but also enjoy happy hour with friends."

That's a specific, local complaint, answered with a specific, local business. It's a different origin story than most of what's on the other side of the creek.

Two Kinds of "First Location"

The rest of North Hills has spent the last two years landing brands making their debut in this market. Reformation is opening its first Raleigh store in the Main District between J.Crew and Veronica Beard. EVEREVE landed between Tecovas and Warby Parker. Velvet Taco chose the Park District, in the former World of Beer space at the base of Captrust Tower, for its first Raleigh restaurant. True Food Kitchen picked North Hills for its first location in the entire state of North Carolina. That's the North Hills story most people already know: a shopping district built around firsts for national chains entering the Triangle.

The Innovation District is running the same play in reverse. Its firsts belong to the people who already live here. Ky's Kandles is Kyla Smith's first storefront after seven years of selling online. Good Graces exists because two Raleigh residents couldn't find the business they wanted to walk into. TrenLend introduced a rental concept the local market hadn't seen before. Designed For Joy gave its artisans a retail presence they didn't have.

Both halves of North Hills are debut grounds. One recruits its debuts from outside the state. The other grows them from inside the zip code. If you've only ever shopped the sidewalks in front of J.Crew and Warby Parker, you've seen exactly one of these two economies, and it's the one that could exist in Charlotte, Nashville, or Austin with the same tenant roster. The other one, across the creek, could only exist here, because the people running it are from here.

What's Coming Next

In January 2026, Kane Realty announced it was expanding the Innovation District's footprint by another 28 acres, close to doubling the original 33-acre site. The company has also described a private greenway segment inside the district that will eventually tie into Raleigh's public Greenway system, extending the same creekside, foot-traffic-first layout that already links Makers Alley to Standard to Benchwarmers.

If the pattern holds, that expansion is more likely to bring additional small storefronts and outdoor gathering space than another round of chain debuts. The district was built on the idea that people want to walk along a creek to get their bagel rather than drive to a strip center, and the tenant list so far backs that up. Worth watching over the next year or two as those 28 acres get built out.

Before You Write It Off as "Just Another North Hills Expansion"

If you already live in North Hills or Midtown, you've probably driven past the Innovation District a dozen times without registering it as its own place. It doesn't front a major road. It doesn't have a sign visible from I-440. You mostly find it by already knowing it's there, or by living close enough at Vine North Hills or one of the nearby apartment communities that the creek trail is just part of your daily walk.

That's worth changing this weekend. Park at Tower 5, or start from the Midtown Farmers Market in the Commons, and walk the ten minutes it takes to cross the bridge. Get a bagel from Benchwarmers. Sit with a coffee at Good Graces and see what a mahjong night looks like on a random Tuesday. The retail directory at the front of North Hills will tell you what national brand picked this market next. The back half will tell you something more interesting: what your own neighbors decided was worth building.

If you're weighing a move into North Hills or Midtown, or thinking about what a home here actually gets you day to day, Laurie Donofrio and the Key Realty Team know this neighborhood block by block, creek bridge included. Reach out when you're ready to unlock your real estate dreams.