What's Actually Under Construction at Sammamish Town Center Right Now

Drive past Metropolitan Market on SE 4th Street this month and you will hit fencing, dirt piles, and a flagger directing traffic around equipment that has been there for over a year now. If you have lived in Sammamish long enough to remember when this stretch was still forested lots, you have probably assumed the thing finally going up is the downtown the city has been promising since 2008: the shops, the restaurants, the walkable core.

It isn't. Not yet. What is actually rising on SE 4th right now is housing, two townhome developments in different stages of delivery, while the retail and restaurant space everyone actually wants is still working through a timeline that has already slipped once since the groundbreaking.

A Ten-Year Run-Up Before a Shovel Moved

The Town Center Plan the city adopted in 2008 sat mostly on paper for most of its life. Bellevue-based STCA LLC, the entity behind developer Innovation Realty Partners, signed its first contract to buy land inside the planning area roughly ten years before construction actually started, and spent 2015 through 2019 assembling the roughly 90 acres that make up its piece of the project. An early version of the Southwest Quadrant plan was rejected by the city in 2019, appealed to the Hearing Examiner, and sent back for revision in 2021.

The ceremonial groundbreaking finally happened on May 18, 2024, with King County Executive Dow Constantine on hand to describe the vision.

"The vision for this town center is an example of how cities can create great places, walkable communities with housing, retail, dining and parks."

Real dirt work followed roughly a year later, in spring 2025, when crews broke ground on the first 38 townhomes.

What's Actually For Sale Right Now

That first phase is Parkside, the project long referred to in city planning documents as Brownstones West. Terrene Homes is building 38 units on the corner of SE 4th Street and 222nd Place SE, directly west of Metropolitan Market. As of this month, Parkside is listed for sale, the first for-sale housing to be delivered inside the modern Town Center footprint since the plan was adopted 18 years ago.

What's Coming This Fall

Right behind it is TerraLuxe, the project formerly labeled Brownstones East, an additional 45 townhomes from Taylor Morrison, the Scottsdale-based builder that has also worked in Kirkland and Redmond. TerraLuxe is scheduled to arrive this fall, which means the two projects together will put roughly 83 new townhomes on the ground inside Town Center by the end of 2026.

The Part That's Still Years Away

The blocks everyone actually cares about, the ones with the pub, the restaurants, and the retail that turns this into a place you'd walk to for dinner, are the core mixed-use blocks 5 through 7. Innovation Realty Partners has approvals there for two seven-story buildings holding 156 apartments, 144 senior-restricted units including a Merrill Gardens facility, a parking garage, and about 88,000 square feet of ground-floor commercial space.

The timeline for that piece has already moved once. In 2024, reporting on the groundbreaking put construction of the core mixed-use space starting sometime in 2026 and taking 18 to 24 months to finish. By August 2025, Samwick himself was describing a longer runway, telling the Sammamish Independent that work on the mixed-use buildings would begin within two years and take three years to complete once it does. That's not a small revision. It moves the realistic opening of the retail core from a possible 2027 or 2028 to something closer to 2029 or later, depending on which of the developer's own estimates you believe.

Samwick has been blunt about managing expectations on this point.

"The idea that thousands of housing units will appear overnight, or in a short time period, is completely false."

The One Preview You Can Actually Taste

The closest thing to a preview of that retail future so far has been an event, not a storefront. The Sammamish Chamber of Commerce hosted a "Taste of the Town" catered personally by chef Tom Douglas under a canopy next to City Hall, sponsored by Innovation Realty Partners and Pillar Properties. It's a glimpse of the kind of dining the plan promises, served for one evening rather than seven days a week.

What You'll Actually Notice This Year

Most of what's changing for residents right now is infrastructure, not storefronts:

• New segments of SE 5th and SE 6th Streets are under construction alongside Parkside, and SE 6th Street specifically is replacing the old entrance and parking area for Lower Sammamish Commons Park with a two-way street and diagonal parking on both sides
• An underground regional stormwater vault, built at a cost of $5.2 million with capacity for more than 1.6 million gallons, is meant to keep runoff from Parkside and neighboring construction from reaching George Davis Creek and Lake Sammamish

If you park at Lower Commons or cut through on 222nd Place SE on your way to the library or the Community and Aquatic Center, this is the construction you're actually navigating, not the future retail.

So What Are You Actually Looking At

The honest answer, as of this month, is a housing project with a long-promised commercial phase still queued up behind it. Parkside is real and for sale. TerraLuxe is real and arriving this fall. The seven-story buildings with the 88,000 square feet of shops and restaurants exist in permits and renderings, with a start date somewhere in 2026 and a finish date that even the developer has already pushed back once.

None of that makes the project less real. It makes it worth knowing which phase you're standing in front of before you assume the fencing on SE 4th means dinner reservations are close. For now, Metropolitan Market, the Chamber's occasional pop-up events, and the rest of Sammamish's existing restaurants along 228th are still doing the work the Town Center's ground floor hasn't started yet.

If you're watching this stretch of SE 4th Street and wondering what it means for a home you already own, or one you're thinking about down the road, Pacific NW Houses tracks projects like this one as they move, not just when they make headlines. Explore Pacific Northwest Homes to see what's actually changing across the neighborhoods we cover.