Melissa is one of the fastest-growing cities in Texas, and the easiest way to see it is to drive US 75 with your eyes open. The 2020 census counted 13,901 residents here, up from 4,695 in 2010 and just 1,350 in 2000 — roughly a tenfold jump in twenty years, and the pace has not let up since. Rooftops, retail pads, and road crews are all competing for the same open ground that was cotton and cattle land a decade ago.
This is a running tally of the projects actually under way or recently finished inside the city, grouped by what they are. Where a store has already opened, we say so. Where dirt is still moving, we say that too.
The US 75 and Highway 121 retail node
The corner where US 75 meets the Sam Rayburn Tollway has become Melissa’s commercial center of gravity, and two anchors landed there in quick succession.
The H-E-B on Central Expressway (1230 Central Expy) opened May 14, 2025. At 136,000 square feet it is a full-scale store, with a pharmacy, fuel, and a car wash on the property. For a city that spent years driving to McKinney or Anna for a big grocery run, its arrival was the kind of thing residents had been asking about for a long time.
Chick-fil-A Melissa followed at 1300 Melissa Crossing Court, opening June 18, 2026. Dine-in hours run Monday through Saturday, 6 a.m. to 9 p.m., with the drive-thru open until 10. Between the two, the intersection now pulls traffic that used to leave the city entirely, and the surrounding pads along Sam Rayburn Highway have filled in with restaurants and services to match.
Downtown: Gateway Village and the street rebuild
The more ambitious construction is happening a few miles east, in the historic downtown district along Highway 5.
Melissa Gateway Village is going up at the corner of SH-5 and Harrison Street. The roughly 55,000-square-foot development is anchored by an Ace Hardware and a Hope Coffee, with additional retail and restaurant space and a two-story office component. It sits inside the city’s Downtown Overlay District, the zoning framework adopted in 2018 to steer growth back toward the old town center rather than letting it all sprawl along the highway. As part of the work, Harrison Street itself is being reconstructed with added on-street parking.
Gateway Village is one piece of a larger downtown street program. The city has planned widening and reconstruction of the east-west streets — Harrison, Cooper, and Fannin — and the north-south streets, including Red River, Central, Sherman, and Santa Fe, adding sidewalks and on-street parking as it goes. The goal is a walkable core with the streetscape to support it, not just a name on a map between the subdivisions.
Housing: build-to-rent arrives
The headline residential project is Wolf Creek Farms, a build-to-rent community from Welker Properties on the city’s west side. At a reported $95 million, it will bring 343 Class-A rental units to more than 32 acres of land between US 75 and the Sam Rayburn Tollway, with a resort-style pool, a dog park, and a fitness center. It was described at announcement as one of the largest new developments in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, and it signals something about where Melissa is headed: a housing market that until recently was almost entirely for-sale new construction is now adding professionally managed rentals at scale.
That for-sale side is still the engine of the city’s growth. The established master-planned communities keep filling in — Liberty, the 535-acre community that opened back in 2003 with its sports pavilion, resort pool, and fishing ponds; and North Creek, planned for more than 1,000 homesites at buildout, with its own elementary school and amenity center. Newer sections around Wolf Creek Farms are being built out by names like Meritage Homes. Every one of those closings is, in effect, a future H-E-B trip, another student enrolled in Melissa ISD, and more pressure on the roads.
The strain the map doesn’t show
Numbers from the school district are the clearest read on how fast all of this is moving. Melissa ISD now serves more than 8,600 students and projects enrollment above 9,300 by 2027 — growth that has the district opening new campuses while many Texas districts are shrinking. Two schools, Highland Elementary and East Cardinal Middle School, opened for the 2025-26 year. The high school’s expansion, funded by the 2021 bond, is expected to add its new arena for 2026-27.
Development at this speed is not free of friction. New retail and new rooftops both land ahead of the roads, the drainage, and the public spaces meant to serve them, which is exactly why the downtown street rebuild and the Overlay District matter as much as any single store opening. The city is trying to build the connective tissue at the same time it absorbs the crowds.
For residents, the practical takeaway is simple: the grocery run got shorter, the restaurant list got longer, and the construction cones are not going anywhere soon. Melissa is still very much a city under construction, and the summer of 2026 is a good snapshot of a place building its center and its edges at the same time.