Drive Twelve Bridges Drive toward the Highway 65 off ramp and you will pass the same corner you have been passing for a while now. Big, flat, mostly empty, with a leasing sign facing traffic at Colonnade Drive. If you have lived here more than a year, you have probably wondered the same thing every time: what is actually going there, and why has it taken this long.
Here is the part that most people driving that corner do not know. The city already said yes. The Lincoln Planning Commission cleared the resolutions for a 245,750 square foot retail development on that exact parcel, spread across fourteen separate buildings, back in the spring of 2025. The developer is Pappas Investments, the same company behind the two smaller shopping centers you already shop at in this neighborhood. On paper, this corner has been a done deal for well over a year.
And yet, as recently as this past June, the same parcel at the northwest corner of Twelve Bridges Drive and Colonnade Drive was still listed on commercial real estate sites as available for lease, with shop, pad, drive-thru, and anchor space all open for the taking. Approved is not the same thing as under construction. That gap between the two is the actual story here, and it tells you something useful about how development moves in this part of Lincoln.
What the City Approved, in Plain Terms
The project sits on parcel 25-A of the Twelve Bridges Specific Plan Area, on the northwest corner of Twelve Bridges Drive and Colonnade Drive. The plans reviewed by Lincoln's Design Review Board describe three building types across the site, named Twain, Tourmaline, and Ammolite, filling out those fourteen buildings on land owned by Pappas Arizona LP and Pappas Gateway LP. The existing BP/Arco gas station on the same master plan map is excluded from the new construction, since it was already permitted as its own fueling station years earlier.
To put 245,750 square feet in context, that is roughly three times the size of the Village at Twelve Bridges, the shopping center most residents already know at 825 Twelve Bridges Drive. This is not a small infill project. It is a full retail center being built essentially from scratch on land that has sat mostly undeveloped since the surrounding neighborhoods filled in.
Why the Corner Still Looks the Same
The honest answer is that big retail projects in growing suburbs do not move on a straight line from approval to grand opening. A resolution from the Planning Commission clears the legal path. It does not guarantee a shovel in the ground on any particular week. What we can say, based on the leasing activity still showing up on commercial listing sites through the middle of this year, is that the site was still being marketed to prospective tenants well after the city gave its blessing. That is a normal part of how these projects work. Developers often line up anchor tenants and smaller shop leases before committing to a construction timeline, because the economics of a fourteen-building center depend on knowing who is actually going to occupy the space.
So if you are watching that corner and wondering why nothing looks different from six months ago, the answer is not that the project fell through. It is that the leasing phase and the entitlement phase can run in parallel for a long stretch before construction visibly starts.
The Retail That's Already Here, and Where It Sits
While that big corner works through its leasing process, the retail that already exists in Twelve Bridges tells its own story. Here is how the three retail nodes in this immediate area compare:
| Center | Size | Built | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| Village at Twelve Bridges (825 Twelve Bridges Dr.) | 86,930 sq ft | 2006 | Open, two suites available totaling 3,645 sq ft |
| Terra Cotta Village (Twelve Bridges Dr. & Colonnade Dr.) | 33,930 sq ft | Developed by Pappas Investments | Open, across the street from Twelve Bridges High School |
| Twelve Bridges Retail Center (NWC Twelve Bridges Dr. & Colonnade Dr.) | 245,750 sq ft, 14 buildings | Approved 2025, not yet built | Site still listed for lease as of mid-2026 |
The Village at Twelve Bridges has been open since 2006 and today has only 3,645 square feet vacant across two suites, out of nearly 87,000 square feet total. That is a center running close to full. Terra Cotta Village, the smaller Pappas property across from the high school, occupies its own footprint and has quietly become the kind of place you stop without thinking twice, because it is on the way to school pickup or the walk from the neighborhood.
Put those two centers next to the 245,750 square foot project still in the leasing phase, and the picture becomes clearer. The retail growth you can actually see and use right now sits in the smaller, already-built centers. The larger transformation is still ahead of you, not behind you.
The Small Businesses Filling In Around the Big Numbers
Square footage numbers do not capture what daily life in Twelve Bridges actually looks like, so it is worth naming a few of the places doing that work on a smaller scale. Epic Sports Cards, tucked into the Sterling Parkway retail strip, has become the kind of shop that a certain kind of family plans a Saturday morning around, especially on release days for new card sets. The Twelve Bridges Library remains one of the most used public spaces in the neighborhood, sitting inside the same trail network that connects the community's parks to its schools.
None of these smaller businesses show up in the square footage totals for the big retail center project. But they are part of why the corridor along Twelve Bridges Drive already functions the way it does, even before the fourteen-building project breaks ground.
The Road Detail Worth Knowing Now
One practical detail buried in the commercial listings for that corner is worth passing along, because it affects how you will actually get in and out of the new center once it opens. Access to the site is planned through several points: Twelve Bridges Drive directly, a southbound U-turn from Colonnade Drive, Fieldstone Drive routed through the existing Walgreens lot, and a future connector called Red Rock Road that will eventually link Colonnade and Fieldstone directly. That last piece, the Red Rock Road connection, does not exist yet. When it does, it will change how traffic moves through this corner in ways that are easy to miss if you are only watching for storefronts to open.
What This Means If You Live Here
If you have been waiting for that big corner to fill in before you believe the neighborhood is "done" changing, it is worth resetting that expectation. The approval happened over a year ago. The leasing activity on the site continued well past that approval date. Construction on a project this size, once it does start, still takes time to deliver finished storefronts. None of that means the project stalled. It means the timeline between a Planning Commission vote and an actual grand opening is longer and less linear than the headline made it sound.
In the meantime, the retail center you can already walk into, the Village at Twelve Bridges, is running close to full. Terra Cotta Village continues to serve the corridor near the high school. And the neighborhood's daily rhythms, from library hours to a Saturday spent flipping through fresh card packs, are already set by businesses that opened years before this bigger project was ever drawn up.
The corner at Twelve Bridges Drive and Colonnade Drive will eventually look different. When it does, you will notice it. Until then, the more accurate read on this neighborhood's retail growth is the one already filled in around you, not the one still marketed as available space.
If you are watching this corridor for a different reason, whether you are thinking about your own next move in Twelve Bridges or just curious what a property near this kind of growth is actually worth today, Jamie Pierroz and the team know this stretch of Lincoln block by block. Book Your Consultation whenever you are ready to talk through what any of it means for you.
