What's New in North Lincoln at North Star Crossing

If you have driven past 27th and Folkways any time in the last half decade, you have seen the rendering. A tidy drawing of storefronts and parking stalls, propped on a sign in front of a fenced-off field, promising something that never quite showed up. Students walking to North Star High School next door watched that lot sit empty through several school years running. Announcements came and went. Nothing opened.

That has finally changed, and not in the small way these things usually change. A Chick-fil-A has been running a drive-thru line since October 2025. Goodwill opened one of its largest Lincoln stores on the same stretch of Folkways Boulevard this year. Casey's has a building permit in hand. The lot that spent years as a rendering is now a place you can actually walk into.

The interesting part isn't that North Star Crossing is filling in. It's how long the gap was between the promise and the delivery, and what that gap tells you about how to read the next round of "coming soon" signs in this part of town.

The Announcement Was 2021. The First Real Tenant Opened In 2025.

The Lerner Company, the Omaha-based developer that also built Lincoln Crossing a block away at 27th and Superior three decades earlier, announced North Star Crossing in early 2021. The pitch was a 50-acre, up to 500,000-square-foot commercial development on a lot that had sat vacant for roughly 30 years. The Lincoln Planning Department approved the use permit that January, construction was slated to start within weeks, and the company said first tenants would open in early 2022.

Here's how that timeline actually played out:

So the four-year gap between "early 2022" and "October 2025" isn't a rounding error. It's the difference between a press release and a business you can walk into. By June 2025, Lerner vice president Ben Meier told a local television station that the company had sold about 75 percent of the 50 acres to retailers, but sold land and open businesses are two very different milestones. A sold parcel can sit behind a chain-link fence for a year while permits, utility work, and construction schedules catch up. That's exactly what happened here.

Meier was candid about the pace when he talked about what comes next:

"We think we'll see a pretty substantial amount of construction completed this year. Then I'm hoping that a vast majority, if not all, will be finished up next year. So we'd like the whole project to be online in '27."

Translation for anyone who lives nearby: treat any remaining "coming soon" sign at this corner as a multi-year proposition, not a seasonal one.

What You Can Actually Walk Into Right Now

Strip away the renderings and the projections, and here's what is open today, with real addresses and real hours:

• Chick-fil-A North Star Crossing, 5805 N. 28th St. Open Monday through Saturday, 6:30 a.m. to 10 p.m., with dine-in, drive-thru, carry-out, third-party delivery, and mobile pickup. It's the fourth Chick-fil-A location in Lincoln, joining the restaurants at 48th and O streets, inside the Nebraska Union at 14th and R, and near SouthPointe Pavilions at 27th and Pine Lake Road. The owner-operator, Mike Stice, also runs the 48th and O Street location, which he opened back in 2019. On opening day, Chick-fil-A Inc. made a $25,000 donation to the Food Bank of Lincoln in honor of the new restaurant, and the location includes a small playground for families with kids.
• Goodwill, 2920 Folkways Blvd. Open Monday through Saturday from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. and Sunday from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. This is one of Goodwill's largest stores in the Lincoln area, run by Goodwill Industries Serving Southeast Nebraska, and it sits at the corner of 30th and Folkways alongside T.O. Haas.
• Casey's General Store. A building permit is filed for a site within the North Star Crossing footprint. As of now that's the status: permitted, not yet operating.

That's a shorter list than the original 500,000-square-foot vision, but it's a real one. Anyone who has been waiting to see if this corner would ever amount to more than a fence and a rendering now has an actual answer.

The $50 Million Number, And What It Actually Measures

When Lerner pitched the project's scale in 2025, the company projected the finished center could generate up to $50 million annually in taxable sales, with roughly double that in additional property tax value once fully built out. That's a City of Lincoln revenue story more than a resident's daily-life story. It speaks to what this corridor is worth to the tax base once retailers are trading at capacity, not to how quickly your Saturday errands got easier.

The distinction matters because it explains the pattern you've been watching for five years. A developer can be entirely honest about selling 75 percent of the land and still have almost none of it open for business, because the revenue projection is tied to the finished, occupied version of the center, not the version with two tenants and a permit. If you're trying to predict when the next storefront opens here, watching building permits get filed, the way Casey's did, is a better signal than watching land-sale percentages.

Mahoney Park Never Waited For Any Of This

While that corner sat behind a fence, the neighborhood's actual anchor for weekend life was already finished and had been for decades. Mahoney Park, off 70th and Adams, is more than 75 acres of softball fields, sand volleyball courts, tennis courts, and a large playground built around a golf course that has been open since 1976.

The golf course itself has a genuine pedigree. It's an 18-hole, par-70 layout stretching 6,459 yards, designed by Floyd Farley, and it has hosted the Nebraska Open and State Golf Championships over the years. The 8th hole was recognized by the Omaha World-Herald as a "Hall of Fame Hole," which is a fairly specific honor for a municipal course to carry. The property also has a full driving range, a practice green, and a snack bar and pro shop for anyone playing a round or just working on their swing between errands.

The point isn't that Mahoney Park is a substitute for the retail corridor across town. It's that North Lincoln's daily rhythm, the softball league on a Tuesday night, the round of golf before it gets too hot, the kids on the playground while someone else finishes nine holes, never actually depended on North Star Crossing showing up on schedule. The park did its job the whole time. The retail corridor is only now catching up to it.

A Quick Word For Anyone Watching This Corner

If you live near 27th and Folkways, you already know the corner better than any press release does. What's changed is that the "coming soon" era is mostly over for the first wave of tenants, even if the full build-out is still tracking toward 2027. That's worth knowing whether you're deciding where to grab dinner after a Mahoney Park softball game or just trying to figure out what that new permit sign at the Casey's lot actually means.

If you're thinking further ahead, whether that's about what this kind of commercial growth means for property values nearby, or you're weighing a move into or out of this stretch of North Lincoln, Amy Birkholz has been tracking how these corridors develop long enough to talk through it honestly. Reach out to schedule a staging and listing strategy consult whenever the timing is right for you.