Forest Acres covers about four square miles and roughly 10,000 residents, and for years the mental map most locals carried had one dominant pin on it: Trenholm Plaza. Forest Drive was the connector, everything else was context. That map is being rewritten right now, and if you already live here you can feel it on a Saturday morning when you're deciding which corner of the city to point the car toward.
The change isn't a single opening. It's a cluster pattern. Four distinct nodes are forming, each with its own personality and its own reason to exist, and by the time the Richland Mall redevelopment delivers in 2027 or 2028, the city will look less like one main strip with outposts and more like a walkable constellation. Here is what's actually happening on the ground, node by node.
Trenholm Plaza is leaning into fast-casual anchors
Trenholm Plaza is owned by Edens and still anchored by Publix and The Fresh Market, but the tenant mix has shifted in a specific direction over the last eighteen months. Sephora and HomeGoods filled the retail bench, and in 2026 the plaza landed Chopt Creative Salad Company's first South Carolina location. Chopt was founded in New York in 2001 and has grown to more than 80 stores nationwide, so the decision to plant its state debut here rather than in Greenville or Charleston is worth pausing on. It says something about how retailers now read this trade area.
Set Chopt next to Verde, the salad and wrap spot that has been at Trenholm Plaza for a while, plus Tazza Kitchen and the Original Pancake House, and one thing becomes clear: this end of Forest Drive has quietly become the lunchtime and after-school node. If you're picking up a rotisserie chicken from Publix, you now have three genuinely different quick lunches inside a hundred yards of your car.
The Forest Drive corridor near Beltline is filling in the gaps
Walk east from Trenholm Plaza and the story changes. The stretch of Forest Drive around Beltline Boulevard, where daily traffic counts run about 25,300 vehicles, has become the corridor for openings that don't need destination pull because the traffic delivers itself.
Three moves in particular:
- Jimador Real opened at 4711 Forest Drive with a soft opening on March 2, 2026, taking the space that Takosushi vacated last fall. It is the debut of a new concept from the El Jimador family, framed by the company as a refined take on Mexican cuisine rather than a straight copy of its Cayce, Lexington, and Irmo locations.
- Tropical Smoothie Cafe landed nearby in the Forest Park shopping center, which sits next door to Cardinal Crossing and is also owned by Colliers.
- The Briar Patch, a children's clothing boutique, opened in the small run between BeBeep a Toy Shop and Boca Grande Burritos. That single block, toys plus kids' clothes plus burritos, now functions as a family errands cluster in a way it didn't two years ago.
A pet-focused opening rounded out the spring. TrussVet, a North Carolina company that runs an urgent-care model for pets, opened its first South Carolina location on Forest Drive in April 2026. For anyone who has spent a Sunday night calling around for a vet, that's a genuinely useful addition, not a novelty.
Still to come this summer along the same corridor is The Honey Market, a coffee, wine, gourmet provisions, and houseware concept from local owner Grace Berger, who also launched Cottage and Vine.
"Elegant, cheeky, and just the right amount of extra," is how Berger has described the atmosphere she is going for. Sited near the gateway from Columbia, it is positioned to catch people entering Forest Acres rather than people already deep inside it.
Cardinal Crossing is the evening node the city didn't have
Cardinal Crossing is a $60 million mixed-use development on Forest Drive with 256 residential units and roughly 42,000 square feet of retail. On paper it's another shopping center. In practice it is functioning as something Forest Acres has not really had before: a walkable evening district.
The current and announced tenant list explains why:
| Concept | Category | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Konnichiwa | Japanese, sushi, hibachi | ~5,807 sq ft, third Midlands location, opening summer 2026 |
| Bad Daddy's Burger Bar | Full-service burgers | Sit-down dinner anchor |
| Lazy Daisy Coffee Co. | Coffee | Morning driver |
| Crumbl Cookies | Dessert | Late-evening traffic |
| Handel's Ice Cream | Dessert | Late-evening traffic |
| West of Vine | Women's boutique | Locally owned by Nancy Hull of Cottage and Vine |
| Ascend Studios | Boutique fitness | Fully leased |
Line those up in order of the day and Cardinal Crossing reads like a full arc: coffee, workout, boutique browse, dinner, dessert. That's a very different value proposition than Trenholm Plaza, which still sleeps early. When Konnichiwa opens this summer with roughly 5,807 square feet of dining space, expect Cardinal Crossing to become the default answer to "where should we go after 7" for a lot of households on this side of the city.
The fourth node is coming to the Richland Mall site
The largest change is still in the ground. The former Richland Mall, which has sat as an underused asset for years, is being redeveloped by Southeastern Development out of Evans, Georgia, at a cost projected at $100 million. This is the largest economic development project in the city's history.
What has been announced:
- Roughly 50,000 square feet of retail
- More than 350 luxury residential units
- A destination Kroger Marketplace at the gateway between Forest Acres and Columbia
- A six-acre public park led by the City of Forest Acres
Retail leasing is expected to begin later in 2026, with delivery targeted between late 2027 and 2028. For residents, the number to pay attention to is the six-acre park. A public green space at that scale, on that corner of the city, changes the pedestrian logic of the whole area. It also means Forest Acres will effectively have two anchor grocers, Publix at Trenholm Plaza and Kroger Marketplace at the former mall, at opposite ends of Forest Drive. That is the kind of infrastructure that quietly reshapes daily habits.
One quieter update worth putting on your radar
Not everything happening in 2026 is a restaurant or a boutique. The Medical University of South Carolina has broken ground on a 4,500 square foot primary care practice on North Trenholm Road, right next to City Hall. The site had been vacant since the 2015 flood, which residents who watched that stretch of Trenholm sit empty for a decade will register immediately. Both Cason Development Group and Mimms Contracting, businesses based in Forest Acres themselves, are involved in the build. A primary care office isn't dinner-table news, but it removes a drive to Downtown Columbia or Two Notch for a lot of families on this side of town.
What this actually means for a Saturday in Forest Acres
Put it all together and Forest Acres in 2026 is a small city with four nodes forming instead of one main strip:
- Trenholm Plaza for groceries, salads, coffee, and errands
- The Forest Drive corridor near Beltline for quick lunches, kids' errands, and specialty services like TrussVet
- Cardinal Crossing for dinner, dessert, workouts, and evening browsing
- The former Richland Mall site, arriving in 2027 to 2028, as a second grocery anchor with a park
For anyone who has lived here a while, the useful frame is this: you no longer have to leave Forest Acres to get through a full weekend day. That was arguably true in a limited way before. It's now true across breakfast, lunch, a workout, dinner out, and dessert with the kids, without pointing your car toward Devine Street, Two Notch, or Harbison. The city hasn't grown in acreage. It has grown in density of options inside the same four square miles, which is a quieter but more meaningful kind of growth.
If you're thinking about the value of your home in this context, or you know someone eyeing a move into Forest Acres and asking what daily life actually feels like here, that's exactly the kind of neighborhood conversation the team at Smith Real Estate Group has every week. Reach out when you're ready to talk through what any of this means for your street, your block, or your next move.
