Drive Douglas Avenue between Merle Hay Road and 75th Street this year and you may start noticing survey crews and fresh paint markings on pavement that already looked fine. No potholes, no crumbling curb, nothing that screams "under construction." Just new lines being tested on a road that has carried four lanes of traffic for decades.
That paint is the first physical evidence of a 20-year plan the city has spent the past few years quietly building, and it tells you something most residents don't yet know: Urbandale isn't waiting for downtown to fill up with shops and then calming the traffic around them. It's doing the opposite. The city is re-engineering how Douglas Avenue behaves first, on the theory that a slower, narrower street creates the market for everything else.
A Corridor Everyone Drives, Nobody Stops On
The problem the city set out to solve wasn't a lack of interest in downtown Urbandale. It was a lack of a downtown at all, at least not one that functioned like one. City traffic consultants found that roughly 80 to 90 percent of vehicles moving through the Douglas Avenue corridor never actually stop there. They're commuters passing between Merle Hay Mall and the rest of the metro, using the four-lane road the way you'd use an on-ramp. (For buyers weighing whether Urbandale is the right fit for your next home, these long-range corridor investments offer a glimpse into how the city is actively planning for community connection.)
"You know, 80% to 90% of cars on Douglas don't stop in downtown Urbandale," said Aaron DeJong, the city's director of economic development, describing the corridor as a place to go through rather than a place to stay. That distinction became the entire premise of the Downtown Master Plan the city council approved on June 17, 2025.
"It has been very clear that people are passionate about downtown Urbandale and want to see it revitalized," said Clint Dudley, owner of Shade Tree Auto and a member of the Downtown Urbandale Stakeholders Group. "In the stakeholder meetings, the city listened to people's concerns and ideas about making downtown more of a destination, not just an area to pass through."
Dudley isn't a disinterested observer. He opened Shade Tree Auto's Urbandale location in 2022 at 70th Street and Douglas Avenue, in what he describes as an underutilized property he turned into a thriving repair shop years before the city drew up any formal plan. He joined the Stakeholders Group, a body of nearly 30 local business owners, property owners, and residents, in 2024, and the group has been meeting every other month since to shape what the city eventually builds.
Two Intersections, Not Twenty Blocks
Here's a detail that doesn't show up in most coverage of the plan: the city isn't trying to revive the entire Douglas Avenue corridor at once. The master plan concentrates early investment on two specific intersections, 70th and Douglas and 67th and Douglas, treating them as the anchor nodes for everything that follows rather than spreading resources thin across the full stretch from Merle Hay Road to 75th Street.
That's not a coincidence of geography. 70th and Douglas is also where Shade Tree Auto sits, and it's the exact location the city chose for its first public test of what a different kind of downtown could feel like. An empty parking lot at that intersection became a three-hour pop-up park with food trucks, a beer garden, a live DJ, yard games, and according to Dudley's own account, more than 700 people who showed up and suddenly felt like neighbors.
That single event functioned as a proof of concept for the harder infrastructure work now underway. It answered a question the city couldn't answer with renderings alone: would people actually come.
What Changes on the Ground
The plan's first concrete move isn't a building. It's the road itself. Here's what's shifting, and why the comparison matters more than either number alone.
Douglas Avenue Today | What the Plan Calls For |
|---|---|
Four travel lanes, minimal on-street parking | Three lanes (one each direction plus a center turn lane), with parking added along the north side |
Posted speed limit of 30 mph, though drivers routinely exceed it | Narrower lanes and added parking designed to physically slow traffic |
A corridor built for through-traffic | A corridor built to be walked, browsed, and lingered in |
The logic behind the lane reduction is worth sitting with, because it's not primarily about congestion. Assistant City Manager Curtis Brown has explained that adding on-street parking and landscaping creates what he calls a kind of natural friction that gets people to slow down without a single new speed limit sign. It's a psychological cue built into the pavement, not a rule enforced by a patrol car (see how local features like this intersect with neighborhood amenities that increase home value).
The pilot striping work is funded as part of a $36 million infrastructure package proposed to roll out in stages: pavement marking tests on Douglas Avenue, followed by preliminary engineering for Madison Street and 71st Street, with zoning changes and larger construction phased in over the following years. City staff have described this sequencing as deliberately development-driven, meaning public investment is designed to prime private redevelopment rather than replace it.
The Zoning Question the City Just Put to Residents
The city held a public open house inside the former GreenState Credit Union building at 7031 Douglas Avenue to walk residents through the zoning changes that would need to happen before any of this can be built. Right now, the land along Douglas Avenue is zoned for neighborhood commercial use, essentially low-density strip retail. The master plan envisions something different: multi-story buildings with active ground floors, mixed-use blocks, and housing types the current code doesn't fully allow for. The city brought on consulting teams to translate that vision into an actual zoning ordinance alongside branding efforts for the corridor.
None of this is theoretical anymore. The city acquired key strategic properties in the center of the downtown area, including the former Econo Lodge site on Douglas Avenue, and is reviewing proposals to redevelop it into multifamily housing. A short distance away near the Urban Loop, just east of Home Depot, a Caliber Development project called The Loop is under construction on more than 10 acres, bringing nearly 250 apartment and townhome units online (explore our guide on condo, townhome, or house options across the metro).
Why the Comparison to Valley Junction Matters
One more detail from the stakeholder process is worth knowing if you've ever wondered what Urbandale is actually aiming for. City economic development staff walked the Stakeholders Group through a comparison of Douglas Avenue against other Des Moines metro districts that share a similar starting point, including Historic Valley Junction, Beaverdale, Prairie Trail, and Ingersoll Avenue. The discussion focused on what makes each district distinct, how people move through them, and what draws people to linger rather than pass through.
That comparison tells you the city isn't inventing a new template. It's studying what already works a few miles away and trying to translate the version of it that fits Urbandale's own geography, its own two-node structure, its own pace.
What This Actually Means If You Live Here
If you've lived in Urbandale for any length of time, you've probably driven Douglas Avenue without thinking of it as a downtown at all, more of a connector between the mall and the rest of your errands. The plan now underway is a long bet that changing the physical feel of the street, before a single new storefront opens, is what finally makes people stop instead of pass through.
The paint crews now testing lane configurations are the opening move in a project that will unfold over the better part of two decades. The next visible signs will likely show up in the zoning ordinance the city finalizes, and in whatever comes next for strategic sites and the two intersections the plan keeps returning to. Keep an eye on 70th and Douglas in particular. It's already done this once.
If you're curious how a specific street, neighborhood, or listing in Urbandale fits into decisions you're weighing for your own home—whether you're planning a step-by-step sale of your home in Urbandale or requesting an updated home valuation—the team at Megan Mitchum + CO knows this market block by block and is glad to talk it through, no pressure, just local knowledge from people who live here too.
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