When Buffalo Block shut down in 2025, the reaction was predictable. Wild Ginger had already closed. So had Bin 119. Three well-known spots off the board in a single year looks, from the outside, like a story about a downtown in trouble.
The Downtown Billings Association has a different read. Vacant spaces downtown typically stay empty for three to six months. When 11 businesses closed at the end of 2024, 10 new ones filled those spots before spring. In all of 2025, eight businesses closed — and 25 new ones opened. The ratio is not a warning sign. It is what a healthy commercial district looks like when it is turning over into something new.
What that something new turns out to be is the more interesting story. Because the closures you mourned were not evidence of decline. They were the vacancy supply that made 25 openings possible, and they are making room for something bigger above the street.
The Ground Floor Has Changed More Than You Think
The spots that opened in 2025 are not interchangeable with what closed. Bin 119 was upscale and established. Earthbound Café, which opened at 207 N. Broadway in early 2025, is a breakfast and lunch concept built around dietary range: vegan, vegetarian, gluten-free, and conventional Montana fare on the same menu. Co-owner Joshua Ploeg described it as "eclectic cuisine" without reinvention. Within two weeks, the place had a steady daily crowd.
Doc Harper's Tavern, already a fixture on the downtown martini circuit, expanded in September 2025 by opening The Waiting Room next door — a prohibition-themed speakeasy with its own separate concept. One owner, two rooms, one address. That kind of layering is new for this block.
Captain Scurvy's Black Dragon Den opened in May 2025. La Morenita arrived in January 2026 at 15 N. 26th St., taking the former Don Luis Restaurant space. It's Roasted — a food truck that spent years building a following on birria tacos and Mexican street corn — finally opened a permanent location in January 2025 after nearly a year of remodeling. Owners Gabriel Espino and Celeste Rocha moved from California to Montana in 2020 and couldn't find the flavors they grew up with. The menu now runs from birria tacos to birria ramen and birria pizza. That kind of specificity takes years of customer feedback to arrive at, which is why the line on opening day stretched out the door.
The Billings ReFill Shoppe reopened at 2713 1st Ave N. Owner Katie Harrison had run a sustainable goods and refillable products shop on Montana Avenue until 2023. She closed, waited two years, and came back downtown. "Being able to be in the heart of downtown gives a more natural relationship to that type of shopping," she said in March 2025. That is not the quote of someone who looked at this stretch of street and saw a bad bet.
Nine more businesses were already committed or in planning for the first months of 2026, including two eateries, three retail shops, two service businesses, and one coffee shop, according to the Downtown Billings Association as of December 2025.
The Part That Was Missing: Height
Here is what the street-level churn was covering. Downtown Billings has not added a significant new building since the DoubleTree. That ends in 2026, and the scale of what is going up has no recent precedent.
Demolition of the Rockman Building at 2704 2nd Ave. N. began in June 2025, clearing the lot next door to Burger Dive for the AC Hotel Billings, a seven-story Marriott property with nearly 140 rooms, ground-floor retail, and a rooftop bar and restaurant with views of the Rimrocks and Beartooth Mountains. Developer Bill Honaker, who owned Walker's Grill for 30 years before selling, has said the rooftop is designed to function as a community venue, not just a hotel amenity. The $40 million project is projected to complete by summer 2027.
Two blocks away, the Futurity Tower is in environmental study and design at the corner of N. 29th Street and First Avenue North, the former Yesteryears Antique Mall site. When it is built, it will be the first high-rise constructed in Montana since 1984 — 12 stories, 140 feet, designed by High Plains Architects with a mass timber superstructure and a goal of LEED Platinum certification. Two floors of retail, restaurant, and office space sit below 10 floors of one- and two-bedroom apartments, 120 units total. Developer Randy Hafer has described the intended rents as middle-range, aimed at nurses, teachers, and bank tellers rather than the luxury market. The city council approved $152,500 in tax-increment financing to relocate the Yesteryears vendors to the Hart Albin building and clear the site.
The Old Billings Hardware Building at 2802 Montana Ave. is being converted into retail and residential space. The Masonic Temple on North Broadway is undergoing mixed-use remodeling. Both are active in 2026.
Four significant projects, most within a few blocks of each other, all moving in the same year. The Billings Gazette reported in January 2026 that Billings' planning division called it infill development "in the truest sense."
Why the Two Stories Are the Same Story
A rooftop bar above the AC Marriott with a sight line to the Beartooths is not an aspiration. It is a scheduled construction project with an architecture firm and a price tag. A 12-story residential tower is not potential. It is the reason Yesteryears packed up and moved two years ago.
The foot-traffic math shifts once those buildings open. The Futurity Tower alone adds 120 apartments to the downtown core — residents who will walk to Earthbound Café for breakfast, to The Waiting Room on a Thursday, past Walker's Grill on a Saturday. When the AC Marriott was announced, the Downtown Billings Association's development director put it plainly: "All of your lunch spots are excited about it. All of your dinner spots are excited about it."
That dynamic works in reverse too. A downtown that now has a prohibition speakeasy, a birria restaurant that earned its brick-and-mortar through five years on a food truck, and a sustainable goods shop that came back after a two-year absence is a more interesting block to walk than what was here before. The construction boom above street level and the restaurant churn below it are not parallel developments. The churn is building the ground-floor texture that makes a denser, vertical neighborhood worth living in. You need both.
The closures were not a warning. They cleared the space.
If you own a home near downtown Billings or are thinking about what the next two years of construction means for values on specific streets, Heidi Brosovich has followed this market closely and can give you a straight read on what is happening where you live. Request a free home valuation — no pressure, just local knowledge applied to your specific situation.
