Saturday morning at Dawley Farm Village looks the same way it has for a couple of years now: a line spilling out the door at Over Easy, a steady stream of pickup orders at Crumbl, someone balancing an iced drink from Caribou Cabin while their kid tugs them toward the Cinemark marquee. New storefronts keep showing up here almost every month. What's easy to miss, standing in that parking lot, is that the development is nearly out of room to put them.
Two miles north, at 6th Street and Veterans Parkway, dirt is already moving ahead of an official groundbreaking set for October 6. That date marks the start of construction on a 118,500-square-foot retail center called Foss Fields, and the timing isn't a coincidence. Dawley filled in first. Now that it's close to full, the next round of east side growth has to go somewhere else.
The Address on Every East Side Grand Opening This Year
If you've noticed a new name at Dawley seemingly every time you drive past, you weren't imagining it. Over Easy, the Arizona-born breakfast concept from The Attic Restaurant Group, opened its doors there in mid-June, a 4,600-square-foot diner near the Cinemark Century East theater with room for 130 people inside and another 40 on the patio. Nekter Juice Bar opened in January, the first in Sioux Falls, and did it during a stretch of minus-40 windchills that didn't seem to slow anyone down. Crumbl Cookies finally arrived after what the development's own updates called a long wait. Buff City Soap opened. Voyage Federal Credit Union held its grand opening on September 12, showing off a new branch built specifically for the site.
That's a lot of ribbon-cuttings for one shopping center in under a year. It's also, as it turns out, close to the last of them.
Why the Village Keeps Squeezing In New Names
Raquel Blount, who represents Dawley Farm Village for Lloyd Companies, put it plainly earlier this year: the development is down to its last remaining land. Only two undeveloped lots are left north of 18th Street, one near Budget Blinds and one in front of the movie theater. South of 18th, the state's new South Dakota One Stop office complex is under construction and expected to bring hundreds of workers to the area, alongside the large Avera Medical Group clinic and employers like Capital Card Services and DGR Engineering already there.
So how does a nearly full shopping center keep adding tenants? Mostly by rearranging what's already there rather than building outward. That pattern started before this year's wave. La Cantina, a Mexican restaurant from Brookings-based owner Reyes Aranda, moved into a space near Buffalo Wild Wings back in 2024, an early sign that new tenants would have to fit into the existing footprint rather than expand it. The same logic is still playing out now. Gents Grooming moved into an existing retail center alongside Subway and Verizon Wireless. Cellar 54, the wine shop that's built a loyal following among mahjong groups and networking meetups, is relocating into a larger adjacent space with an exposed ceiling and room for more tables. The old Kidtopia storefront is on the market for whoever's next.
None of this is happening because Dawley needs the foot traffic. The development already draws more than 7.6 million visits a year, with 5 percent annual growth, according to figures Lloyd Companies shared this spring. It's happening because there's still demand for space and almost nowhere left to put it. That mismatch is exactly what pushes the next wave somewhere new.
Two Miles North, a Second Engine Is About to Break Ground
Foss Fields sits at the southwest corner of 6th Street and Veterans Parkway, on land that was once the homestead of Joe Foss, which is where the adjacent apartment complex gets its name. The retail center will be anchored by Hobby Lobby, the retailer's second Sioux Falls location, and will include Sierra Trading Post, which has never had a store in this city before. Ross Dress for Less, Five Below, and Petco round out the five-tenant power center, with nine additional outlots still open for restaurants and other retail.
A SiouxFalls.Business report quoted Ryan Tysdal of Tysdal Commercial, the broker behind the project, on the difference between what's happening at Foss Fields and what already exists at Dawley.
"Dawley is one big, long power center, and Foss Fields has a major intersection right in the middle of the development."
That layout difference matters for how the site will actually function day to day, but the more telling detail is what Tysdal said was still missing as of early September, weeks before the groundbreaking. The retail anchors were locked in. The restaurants weren't. "The next thing you're going to want to keep your ears open for is in the months to come, we'll have some restaurant announcements," he said in a KELOLAND report, adding that the east side wasn't quite ready for sit-down restaurants in the early 2000s but is a different case now.
That gap between confirmed retail and pending restaurants is the clearest sign that Foss Fields is still in its opening chapter, not its middle.
The rooftops backing up that bet are already under construction. Foss Fields Ascent, the apartment development on the same land, is on track to become the largest multifamily project in the state at 500 units. Phase one, 100 units, is finished and leasing. Phase two, adding another 250 units, broke ground this summer. Phase three will bring 150 more. Building permit data for the first half of 2026 showed that four of the five highest-valued projects filed in Sioux Falls were apartment complexes, and Foss Fields Ascent's second phase topped that list.
What to Watch For Next
If you've been waiting for Dawley to add one more coffee shop or fast-casual spot, the honest answer is that there's almost nowhere left for it to go. The growth hasn't stopped. It's relocating to a corner of town that didn't have a real retail center at all until this fall.
For now, Dawley still has its own calendar worth keeping. Harvest on Highline, the development's annual fall event with painted pumpkins and craft vendors, has become a fixture each October and is worth checking the shopping center's own event listing for this year's date. It's a good marker of how established that side of the east side has become, even as the newer story is unfolding up at 6th and Veterans.
If you're curious what lands on those nine open outlots at Foss Fields over the coming months, or what else shows up as the last of Dawley's space gets claimed, Danielle Konechne keeps an eye on how the east side keeps rearranging itself and is always glad to talk through what's changing.
