Drive north on Newport Highway past Highland Road and the new North 40 Outfitters is impossible to miss. It's a sprawling farm-and-ranch store with an archery range built in, a garden center that opens each spring, and a parking lot big enough to make you wonder what else is supposed to go here. That's the part most people notice next: the graded pads sitting quiet on either side of the building, waiting for something.
They're not leftover construction debris and they're not a stalled project. They're the second half of a bet that Mead's own commercial developers have been making out loud for three years, and the timeline on that bet has already slipped once. Understanding why tells you more about what's actually happening on your daily drive than any press release about a grand opening weekend.
A Store That Outgrew Its Own Neighborhood
The old North 40 store on Newport Highway had been serving Mead for 16 years out of a 55,600-square-foot building. The replacement, which opened about a half mile south at the northwest corner of Newport Highway and Highland Road, is more than double that at 113,400 square feet. It employs roughly 95 people, up from about 65 at the old location.
That's not a modest upgrade. That's a company deciding the area around it is going to need a much bigger store, and building for a version of Mead that doesn't fully exist yet.
The company celebrated with a proper weekend for it. From April 17 through April 19, 2026, the new location held its Grand Opening Celebration with more than $33,000 in giveaways, including a bow setup from Xpedition Archery, jewelry from Montana Silversmiths, a Bobcat CT1025 tractor, a Husqvarna zero-turn mower, and a Priefert round pen. The store had technically been open since October 2025, but the celebration was really an announcement: this location is here to stay, and it expects the traffic to justify the size.
The Buildings That Haven't Shown Up Yet
North 40 is the anchor for a planned 130,000-square-foot retail center, meaning the store itself accounts for well under the full footprint. The site plan calls for four more buildings around it, and the mix under discussion has been consistent for years: a restaurant or two, a bank, a convenience store, a medical practice. As of the store's opening, the developers marketing the project said they were in early conversations with potential tenants they weren't ready to name yet.
Chris Bell, the broker marketing the site for NAI Black, put the logic plainly when the project was first announced. The North Spokane Corridor, he said, "is going to change shopping habits and driving patterns and shift a lot of commerce up north." That's the thesis behind every empty pad you see out there. The retail center isn't sized for the Mead of today. It's sized for the Mead that shows up once the freeway actually connects.
The Freeway the Whole Corridor Is Waiting On
Here's where the timeline gets interesting. When Bell first announced the North 40 project in 2023, he described the retail center as the anchor for the corridor "especially when the North South Freeway is completed in 2028." That was the working date at the time.
By the time North 40's flagship store opened in 2025, the completion estimate attached to the project had moved to 2030. And by mid-2026, a WSDOT spokesperson interviewed about visible construction progress north of the Spokane River gave an even softer answer. "The good news though is that we are fully funded for completion at this point and we're looking at completion at some point in the early 2030s," said Nicole LaGoo of WSDOT.
Three different years, three different completion windows, all attached to the same 10.5-mile freeway.
| When it was said | Who said it | Projected completion |
|---|---|---|
| 2023 | NAI Black, announcing the North 40 project | 2028 |
| Late 2025 | Coverage of the store's opening | 2030 |
| 2026 | WSDOT spokesperson | "early 2030s" |
None of that means the highway is stalled. Crews are actively boring shafts, pouring columns, and setting girders on the stretch between Mission and Sprague avenues, and the segment crossing the Spokane River is expected to finish this year after a construction delay pushed it past its original late-2025 target. The state has already bought all the land it needs and confirmed the project is fully funded through completion. It's real progress. It's just progress on a schedule that keeps quietly resetting itself, and the retail center on Newport Highway is built around whatever that schedule turns out to be.
What's Actually Filling In Around You Right Now
While the freeway timeline drifts, the ground-level changes near North 40 are real and happening in pieces. MultiCare Health System bought 30 acres of land just north of the Costco store on Mellon Parkway for future health care development, though no construction has started there yet. Shriner's Hospital for Children bought 8 acres nearby, flanked by the Costco and MultiCare properties. Behind both of them, Greenstone's Mead Works development is underway on land that once belonged to the old Kaiser Aluminum smelter, with a first phase of about 150 units, a mix of single-family homes, cottage homes, and townhouses, already staked and under construction. As of last year's pricing, model homes there ranged from a 900-square-foot two-bedroom rancher at $449,000 to a 3,600-square-foot five-bedroom home near $756,000.
Put together, reporting on the area has put the value of planned development in the Mead trade area, from Mead Works to the North 40 Retail Center to MultiCare's land, at more than $1 billion. That's a lot of capital being staged in one small stretch of Newport Highway, most of it still waiting on the same freeway timeline North 40 is.
In the meantime, if you're hungry, the corridor's daily rhythm hasn't changed all that much. Cinola Restaurant & Lounge on Newport Highway is still doing its Friday prime rib. Highway Grind is still open at 5 a.m. for the early commute crowd. Union Pizza on Market Street is still turning out the same pies people have been ordering for years. The new construction is happening around the old routines, not replacing them, at least not yet.
Reading the Corridor Like a Local
If you live in Mead, the honest way to think about Newport Highway right now is this: the big, finished-looking parts, like North 40's new store, are the confident bets. The empty, graded parts next to them are the patient ones, and patience here is measured in years, not months. The freeway that all of this is staged around has moved from a 2028 promise to an early-2030s one in the space of three years of reporting, and there's no reason to assume the next update won't shift it again.
That's not a reason to expect nothing to happen. Mead Works is pouring foundations right now. North 40's tenants list is supposed to grow "in the months ahead." But if you've been wondering why the lots next to the new superstore look the same way they did last spring, now you know: they're not behind schedule. They're on someone else's schedule, and that schedule runs through a highway interchange that's still being built one column at a time.
If you're watching this corridor because you're curious about where Mead is headed, or because you're thinking about what a home near this kind of growth is actually worth, the Inland Empire Home Team has been tracking these Newport Highway changes as they unfold. Reach out any time you want a local read on what's actually happening, not just what's been announced.
