"Now with all the new things here, this is where the majority of our life happens."
That's Julie Postmus, a longtime Hudsonville resident, describing what changed for her family in a Fox 17 story this spring. She used to drive to Grand Rapids or Holland for almost everything. She doesn't anymore. What's worth noticing is not that a small city added some restaurants. It's the order things happened in, which ran opposite to how downtowns usually come back to life.
Most small-town revivals follow a familiar script: an old brick storefront gets a new tenant, then another, then a coffee shop fills a gap, and momentum builds one lease at a time. Hudsonville didn't have an old brick Main Street to work with. What it had, for years, was a stretch of Chicago Drive dominated by used car lots and a patchwork of underused buildings. So the city did something most small cities won't risk. It bonded for the money, bought the distressed property outright, and built the walkable footprint, the streets, the plaza, before a single tenant had signed a lease. The storefronts came after the sidewalks. This year is the one where that bet is visibly paying off.
The Corner That Didn't Exist Yet
If you've driven past School Avenue and the newly extended Harvey Street lately, you've seen the physical evidence of that sequencing. Harvey Street was rebuilt as a woonerf, a shared street where pedestrians and slow traffic mix without curbs dividing them. Terra Square, the city-owned farmers market and event space, opened nearby as a proof of concept: build the gathering spot first, let residents start showing up, and worry about who fills the buildings around it later.
That's also where the name Terra Station comes from. The $32 million, 141-unit apartment and retail development that broke ground near School Avenue in late 2024 was named as a direct nod to the square it sits beside. As of this summer, Business View Magazine put the project's value closer to $35 million, a sign of how much the retail component grew once real tenant interest showed up. The residential side has already outpaced expectations. Fox 17 reported in May that Terra Station is nearing full capacity, with 140 units across six buildings mixing studios, one-bedrooms, and two-bedrooms.
The ground-floor retail is filling in on its own timeline. Terra Station's own leasing materials list Legacy Wine as coming soon, joining a corridor that already includes Fernweh Clothing Shop, owned by Cassie Ghent, and 317 Coffee, where barista Becky Ferreira has watched the block go from car lots to a place people actually stop. A few blocks over on Chicago Drive, Rock n' Thai owner Kong Khammanivong has run his restaurant long enough to remember when that stretch was nothing but old dealerships. He's said as much publicly: the change has been years in the making, and it isn't subtle anymore.
Ice Cream Comes Back to Where It Started
The detail that best captures this year's shift arrived in April, and it has nothing to do with apartments or square footage. Huddy's, a locally owned ice cream shop, held its grand opening and ribbon cutting on April 22 at 5340 Plaza Ave, right on Harvey Street. Ice cream has a specific history in this city. Hudsonville Ice Cream traces its roots to local farmers who started crafting the brand in 1926, before the company eventually moved its operations to Holland. For decades, that meant a hometown name lived somewhere else.
Co-owner Matt VanWoerkom framed the new shop's location as intentional, describing it as the perfect spot for friends and family to meet up for a treat, positioned near local restaurants, Hudsonville High School, and the still-planned Village Green. It's a small business, but it landed at the exact intersection the city spent years preparing. That's not a coincidence. It's what happens when infrastructure comes first and businesses choose where to plant themselves once the groundwork is visible.
The Piece That's Still Coming
Not everything downtown is finished, and it's worth being straightforward about that. The Village Green, the centerpiece of Hudsonville's Imagine Hudsonville 2030 master plan, is still in the planning stage as of this year. City records show that in February 2026, Economic Development Director Jakob Bigard and City Manager Dotson reviewed proposals from three consulting firms for the project, weighing whether a strategic advisory approach or a more tactical, construction-focused one would better guide the space through design and phasing. The Michigan Economic Development Corporation and the Michigan Municipal League have already provided predevelopment support, including conceptual renderings and an environmental assessment, through the state's Redevelopment Ready Communities program.
When it's built, the plan describes a central gathering space meant to host concerts, city festivals, art and craft shows, holiday events, and ice skating. That's a lot of programming for a lot that, as of this writing, is still in the consultant-selection phase rather than under construction. For residents watching the pattern established by Terra Square and Terra Station, the sequencing tells you what to expect: the public space will likely open before every building around it is leased, the same way Harvey Street's woonerf existed before most of the storefronts along it did.
What an Ordinary Weekend Looks Like Now
The practical result of all this construction-before-commerce is a downtown that rewards showing up on foot. A Saturday morning at Terra Square's farmers market can now roll straight into an afternoon browsing Fernweh, a coffee at 317, and an evening walk down Harvey Street that ends at Huddy's. None of those stops existed in the same concentrated stretch three years ago. Kristy Miller, another Hudsonville resident quoted in that same Fox 17 piece, put the scale of change in her own terms, comparing today's growth to what it felt like decades ago when McDonald's and then Burger King first arrived in town. A Meijer and a couple of Taco Bells followed. Now it's a mixed-use apartment building, a locally owned creamery, and a public square doing the same work of making the town feel complete.
That's the part worth sitting with if you already live here. The city didn't wait for private investment to prove the concept. It built the frame, absorbed the risk, and let residents decide whether they'd use it. Based on how quickly Terra Station has leased up and how much attention Huddy's drew on opening weekend, they have.
If you're curious about what this kind of momentum tends to mean for property values or timing down the road, that's a longer conversation, and one Tammy Kerr is glad to have when you're ready. Schedule a personalized consultation any time you want to talk through what a changing downtown means for your own corner of Hudsonville.