For the better part of a decade, if you brought up the empty acreage at Bardstown Road and the Gene Snyder Freeway in Fern Creek, you got the same response: an eye roll. Neighbors in the nearby Glenmary subdivision watched dirt get pushed around for years with nothing to show for it. One resident, Jason Sanders, put it to WDRB about as plainly as it gets: "Big holes in the ground aren't a whole lot to look at."
That was 2024. It is worth updating the record, because a lot of what people in Fern Creek assume about that corner is now out of date. The lot isn't empty anymore. It also isn't finished, and the specific thing that's still missing tells you more about how retail actually gets built here than the parts that already opened.
What's Actually There Now
The development is called SouthPointe Commons, a 48-acre, 363,000-square-foot project on the southeast corner of Bardstown Road and I-265. For years its only open tenant was a Panera Bread. That changed fast starting in 2025.
Here's what's confirmed open on the site:
- Bubba's 33, the Texas Roadhouse-owned sports bar concept, opened to the public on April 28, 2025, at 10435 Southpointe Boulevard. It brought roughly 200 jobs with it and has been running long enough now to rack up more than a year of Yelp reviews.
- First Watch, the daytime breakfast and lunch chain, is open in the same retail cluster.
- Panera Bread, the original tenant, has been there the longest.
- Bank of America finished construction and opened as the second tenant on the site.
- Paint Nail Bar is also operating in the area, one of the small service businesses that filled in around the anchors.
A new emergency room and urgent care facility was under construction on the same stretch of Bardstown Road as of early 2025. Its current status isn't confirmed in available reporting, so treat it as close but not verified open.
That is a real change in what the corner offers a resident on a Tuesday night. For years the standing complaint from people in Fern Creek was that there was nowhere to walk or bike to for a sit-down meal without getting on Bardstown Road proper. Bubba's 33 and First Watch are the direct answer to that complaint, not a nearby substitute.
Why It Took Nine Years to Open a Panera
The interesting part isn't that SouthPointe Commons eventually filled in. Retail centers get built all the time. It's that this one took an unusually long time relative to its size, and the reason has nothing to do with demand.
The project was first proposed back in 2008. It didn't clear its final zoning approval until 2010, and even then it spent years mired in litigation over the zoning fight before the Kentucky Court of Appeals upheld the approval. Developer Barrister Commercial Group didn't break ground until 2017, nearly a decade after the original proposal. From groundbreaking to a real, functioning restaurant on site took another eight years.
That's a legal and regulatory delay, not a market one. The traffic counts on that intersection (48,000 vehicles a day on Bardstown Road, 66,000 on the Gene Snyder) were never in question. The site was never short on customers. What it was short on was a clear path through zoning objections and neighborhood pushback, which is a different problem entirely and one that doesn't show up in any of the demand numbers a shopping center developer usually cites.
The Center That Beat It to the Finish Line
Here's the part that makes SouthPointe's timeline look even stranger by comparison. About a half mile down Bardstown Road, a much smaller project called Cedar Creek Crossing broke ground in 2021, four years after SouthPointe, and had all 17 of its tenants open by 2024, before SouthPointe had gotten much further than Panera and a bank branch.
Cedar Creek Crossing is a fraction of the size, just over 43,000 square feet across six buildings on about 9 acres, compared to SouthPointe's planned 363,000 square feet on 48 acres. It filled that smaller footprint with seven restaurants, a fitness studio, salons, a credit union, and a dentist's office, including a Chicken Salad Chick location. A 7 Brew coffee stand went up across the street from it, and a 168-unit apartment complex called Cedar Creek Flats has been under construction nearby.
The lesson isn't that smaller projects move faster because they're smaller. It's that Cedar Creek Crossing wasn't fighting a decade-old zoning battle. It went from vacant land to a fully leased center in about three years because there was nothing legal standing in the way. SouthPointe had the traffic counts and the acreage to be the bigger draw, and still lost the race to a competitor a third of its size, because the delay was never about the market.
What's Still Missing, and Why It Matters More Than the Restaurants
The anchor tenant everyone in Fern Creek has actually been waiting for isn't a restaurant. It's the grocery store.
Hy-Vee, the Iowa-based chain, announced in early 2022 that it would build its first Louisville store at SouthPointe Commons, a 150,000-square-foot flagship on land it had already acquired. The company originally targeted a 2023 opening. As of the most recent reporting available, from mid-2025, the store still hadn't been built and no opening timeline had been confirmed since. It would be one of the largest Hy-Vee locations the company has planned outside the Midwest, which may be part of why it's taking longer than the restaurants around it.
That gap matters more than it might seem. A Bubba's 33 and a First Watch tell you the site is finally functional for dinner and brunch. A 150,000-square-foot grocery anchor tells you whether the corner becomes a genuine daily-errands destination for the neighborhoods around it, the kind of place where a resident does a full grocery run without getting back on Bardstown Road. Restaurants opened first because restaurant buildouts move faster than a store of that scale, not because the grocery piece stopped being part of the plan.
What This Means If You Live Nearby
If your mental map of that corner still says "big empty lot with a Panera," it's time to redraw it. There's a functioning restaurant row there now, an urgent care facility that was nearing completion as of last report, and a bank branch that's been running for a while. The traffic that used to be a punchline about the site not existing has shifted into a punchline about the site being too busy, which is its own kind of proof that something changed.
What hasn't changed is the piece that would make the biggest difference for day-to-day life in Fern Creek: a full-size grocery store within walking or short-driving distance of that intersection. Until Hy-Vee actually breaks ground, that part of the original promise is still just a promise, three years past its original opening date.
Fern Creek's slow corners have a way of turning into its busiest ones eventually, and knowing which stretch of Bardstown Road is actually finished versus still catching up is the kind of detail that matters whether you're grabbing dinner tonight or thinking ahead about the neighborhood's next few years. ZHomes Real Estate, led by Gilbert Zaldivar, keeps a close eye on how these corridors evolve. If you're curious what a specific block or street in Fern Creek looks like right now, reach out, or get a home valuation to see how these changes are shaping local value.
