Every spring for years, a pair of red-tailed hawks has nested on the Old Town Clovis water tower, and every spring the Clovis Police Department has posted the video: eggs, hatching, awkward first flights. It is the version of Clovis that people already picture when they think of this town: Pollasky Avenue, the antique shops, a civic ritual small enough to fit in a Facebook post. It is a nice story, and it is also, this year, not where the action actually was.
If you spent 2026 running errands on the Old Town side of the city, you likely missed most of what changed. The real building boom landed north and west of downtown, on two corridors that had almost nothing going on eighteen months ago. That is the actual story of Clovis in 2026: not a scattering of new businesses, but a concentration of them, on Shaw Avenue and at the Herndon and Clovis intersection, while at least one older shopping center is stuck arguing with its landlord about air conditioning.
Shaw Avenue Became the New Main Street
Start at Shaw and Leonard, at Loma Vista Marketplace. Eighteen months ago this was a shopping center anchored by a Tractor Supply Company. Now it is the fastest-growing retail corner in the city.
Ulta Beauty opened there in April. Five Below opened its doors on May 1. By mid-May, construction crews were inside a corner suite building out a Paris Baguette, the South Korean bakery chain known for its fruit pastries and mochi doughnuts, which already runs two locations in Fresno. Signage went up on the doors in May with an expected opening window of late August or September, which means it should be serving customers right around the time you're reading this, or very close to it.
That is not the end of the Loma Vista buildout. Reporting on the shopping center's Phase 2 development named four more tenants slated to open nearby: Press Box, Jamba Juice, Batter Up, and Butterfish. None had signage up as of the most recent reporting, so treat those as confirmed but not yet dated. What is confirmed is the pattern: this corner is absorbing new tenants faster than almost anywhere else in Clovis, one storefront at a time, in a way that looks more like a plan than a coincidence.
Further out on the same road, on Shaw between Willow and Peach, the city's first Chick-fil-A opened July 1 at 6:30 in the morning, with guests lined up since midnight. The location is locally owned and operated by Andrew Bloom, and the company says it created around 120 jobs. Bloom framed the opening around something bigger than a drive-through line:
"My hope for this restaurant is to be more than just a place to eat."
That is standard opening-day language for a franchise, but the jobs number is not, and the fact that Chick-fil-A chose Shaw Avenue for its first Clovis footprint, rather than a spot closer to the freeway or the mall, tells you where the company's own market research pointed. Shaw Avenue in 2026 is not a quiet secondary road. It is where new construction is choosing to be.
North on Herndon, the Same Bet
Drive up to Herndon and Clovis Avenue and you will find the same pattern playing out at Clovis Crossing, the shopping center anchored by Walmart, Nordstrom Rack, Dick's Sporting Goods, and HomeGoods.
The former JOANN Fabrics space there sat empty after the crafts chain closed all its stores in 2025 following a Chapter 11 filing. On April 29, it reopened as an 18,000-square-foot Barnes & Noble, the retailer's third location in the greater Fresno area and its first store in Clovis itself, joining existing locations in Fresno's Villaggio Shopping Center and Fashion Fair Mall. Local author Monica Murphy cut the ribbon. The Cat in the Hat showed up. It was, by local news accounts, a genuinely well-attended grand opening.
What's more interesting than the ribbon cutting is who is behind it. The company that owns the Clovis Crossing property, Clovis-Herndon Center LLC, is controlled by developer David Paynter, the same person who redeveloped Sequoia Mall in Visalia. Paynter's firm placed a Barnes & Noble in that Visalia project too. That is not a coincidence of retail preference. It is one developer running the same playbook twice in the Central Valley: take a vacant big-box space in an otherwise stable, anchor-heavy center, and backfill it with a national retailer that is, unusually for 2026, still opening new stores rather than closing them.
Between Clovis Crossing and Loma Vista Marketplace, you have two different landlords making functionally the same decision within months of each other: this is where new retail dollars in Clovis are going. Not scattered across the city. Concentrated on two corridors that, until recently, weren't considered the city's commercial center of gravity at all.
The Corner That Isn't Getting the Same Investment
Here is the part of the story that a simple "look what's new" roundup would skip. Not every retail center in Clovis is having this kind of year.
Sierra Vista Mall's tenants have been publicly raising concerns about broken air conditioning, telling local news they've dealt with uncomfortable indoor temperatures for years while waiting on repairs. That complaint surfaced again just this month. It is a small thing on its own, an HVAC problem, the kind of maintenance issue that shows up at aging properties everywhere. But set next to a year when two other shopping centers landed a bookstore, a bakery, a beauty retailer, a discount chain, and a national fast-food brand almost simultaneously, the contrast says something. Capital is not evenly distributed across Clovis retail right now. It is following specific corners, and Sierra Vista is not currently one of them.
That matters if you live here and you've noticed your own shopping habits quietly shifting. It is not your imagination that you're driving to Shaw Avenue or Herndon more often this year. The stores worth visiting have been moving there too.
What Actually Changed on Your Errand Map
If you tried to draw the "new Clovis" of 2026 on a map, it would look less like scattered dots and more like two thickening lines: Shaw Avenue from Leonard out past Willow and Peach, and the Herndon and Clovis intersection anchoring Clovis Crossing. Old Town still has its water tower hawks, its antique shops, its rodeo history. That part of the city's identity hasn't gone anywhere. But the commercial energy this year, the new jobs, the new construction, the new reason to get in your car on a Saturday, has been happening somewhere else entirely.
For anyone who has lived here long enough to remember when Shaw and Leonard was just a Tractor Supply parking lot, that is worth noticing. It is not a story about any single opening. It is a story about where two separate developers, a national bookstore chain, and a Georgia-based chicken restaurant all independently decided to place their bets in the same twelve months. When that many unrelated players read the same map the same way, the map is usually right.
Clovis is still becoming something. The interesting part is that it is becoming it on Shaw Avenue and at Herndon and Clovis, not in the postcard version of downtown that shows up in every other roundup of this city.
Whether you're thinking about your next move across town or just want a clearer read on how Clovis is actually growing, the team at Iron Key Real Estate watches these shifts as part of the job. Reach out anytime you want a local, straight answer about what a corner of this city is really doing.
