Drive south on U.S. 27 through Davenport this month and you'll pass a shopping center that didn't exist a year ago, next to an intersection everyone's been talking about for the better part of a decade. One of those places is stocked, staffed, and selling groceries right now. The other is still a construction site with a target date, no pun intended, of this October.
That gap says something about how this stretch of road actually fills in. The projects that get the press conferences take years. The ones that just open on a Thursday morning are usually the ones already changing your week.
The Store That Already Opened
Publix opened its newest Polk County location on June 25, 2026, at The Shoppes at Citrus Creek, a 48,387-square-foot store at 42660 U.S. Highway 27. It's the same stretch of highway Davenport residents have watched go from construction dust to a very familiar green-and-white facade over the past couple of years. Publix's own opening announcement quoted media relations manager Hannah Herring framing the store as becoming part of the everyday moments that matter to customers, with associates ready to welcome the community with the service people already expect from the brand.
What's easy to miss is how routine this actually is for Publix right now. The Citrus Creek store was the third of four new Polk County locations the chain opened in 2026 alone, following an April opening in Winter Haven and another Winter Haven store in June. Publix spent $2.3 billion on new and remodeled stores in 2025. A single new location in Davenport isn't a headline anywhere except here, which is exactly the point: grocery chains build where the rooftops already exist. Nobody needed a groundbreaking ceremony to know this stretch of U.S. 27 would eventually get a Publix. The rooftops already filling in around it did that work.
The Opening With No Ribbon-Cutting
Earlier that same June, before Publix ever opened its doors, CAVA quietly opened a location in Davenport, marking its arrival with a Community Day rather than a press conference. The fast-casual chain invited new neighbors in for a free meal and raised money for Feeding Tampa Bay as part of the opening, and the company said the store would hire between 25 and 40 local employees.
There was no groundbreaking photo op for CAVA. No years-long approval fight, no city commission votes, no developer explaining how many meetings it took to get the Department of Transportation to say yes. A fast-casual restaurant doesn't need road improvements or a water management district sign-off. It needs a vacant storefront and rooftops nearby. Davenport already had both, so CAVA simply showed up, hired locally, and started serving bowls.
That's the pattern worth noticing on this corridor. The businesses that serve you tomorrow morning tend to arrive fast and quiet. The ones that make the news tend to take years.
Up the Same Highway, a Very Different Timeline
Now compare that to the project Central Florida news outlets have actually been covering: Crossroads Village Center, the 120-acre development going up at the intersection of U.S. 27 and U.S. 17-92 in Haines City, just up the same highway Davenport residents already drive.
The developer, Black Mountain Group, has been trying to get this project built since 2018. Director Syed Raza has described sitting through roughly 120 meetings with the Florida Department of Transportation before finally getting approval, on top of a separate multi-year fight with the Southwest Florida Water Management District over 57 acres of wetlands on the site. The pandemic set the whole thing back further. A groundbreaking ceremony finally happened in April 2025, with Haines City Vice Mayor Morris West telling reporters the area would soon draw shoppers from as far as Tampa and Fort Lauderdale.
Phase one, anchored by a 147,000-square-foot SuperTarget, is targeted for completion this fall, with Target aiming to open in October 2026. That single anchor store has been in the works for roughly eight years. The Publix down the highway in Davenport, serving that same U.S. 27 corridor, went from construction dust to open doors in a fraction of that time once the rooftops around it existed to support it.
| Business | Where things stood before | What's true now |
|---|---|---|
| CAVA, Davenport | No prior announcement locally | Opened June 2026, hired 25 to 40 employees |
| Publix, Shoppes at Citrus Creek | Under construction through early 2026 | Opened June 25, 2026 |
| Target, Crossroads Village Center | In planning since 2018, groundbreaking April 2025 | Targeted to open October 2026 |
What Actually Runs on Schedule
While the retail corridor sorts itself out one opening at a time, the other half of a Davenport week hasn't changed much at all, and that's not a complaint. Northeast Regional Park on U.S. 27 has quietly been the constant. Polk County's own park listing describes a facility built for actual daily use rather than ribbon-cuttings: six artificial turf multipurpose fields, four more for baseball and softball, tennis and racquetball courts, a screened pavilion available to rent, and a boat launch with bank and pier fishing on Lake Davenport.
The dog park side of the property tends to get the most word of mouth. It's fully fenced, split into separate areas for big and small dogs, and includes a water fountain and shaded seating, which matters more than it sounds like in a Florida summer. None of that required a developer to win over the Department of Transportation. It just required Polk County to build it once and maintain it, which is a different kind of infrastructure than a shopping center waiting on phase two.
A few things worth knowing if the park is new to your rotation:
- The paved loop around the property runs about 1.4 miles and is popular for an early walk or a casual bike ride before the heat sets in.
- The playground was built with a nature-inspired design, one of the first of its kind in Florida.
- Boat and personal watercraft access is free, with parking available right at the launch.
Reading the Corridor Right
If you've been waiting for some single moment where Davenport "arrives," you'll be waiting past October, and probably past whatever opens after Target too. That's not how this corridor works. The daily-use tier, groceries, fast-casual food, the park you already drive past, tends to show up quietly and on short notice because it only needs the neighborhood that's already here. The anchor tier, the Targets and the multi-hotel mixed-use developments, takes years because it's betting on a neighborhood that doesn't fully exist yet.
Both are real signals. They're just not on the same clock. If you want to know what your stretch of U.S. 27 actually looks like right now rather than what it's projected to look like in five years, the grocery store that opened in June is a better read than the Target that hasn't opened yet.
Davenport residents who've watched this play out for a few years already know this instinctively. The rest of us are just catching up to what the drive down 27 has been telling us all along.
If you're weighing what any of this means for your own address, whether it's proximity to the new Publix, the coming Crossroads Village Center, or just wanting a clearer read on how your corner of Davenport is trending, Gavin Hatch and the APEX team track these changes block by block. Reach out for a free home valuation and a conversation grounded in what's actually happening on the ground, not just what's on the drawing board.
