The empty Big Lots at 1515 Main Street has been the Heights' most visible piece of retail limbo for a while. As of July 10, 2026, it has a next chapter: Town & Country Foods is taking the box for its second Billings store, a roughly 30,000-square-foot grocery with a target of up to 100 jobs and a spring 2027 opening. Langlas & Associates is the general contractor, and company president Travis Frandsen has said the makeover is expected to begin soon.
That announcement is the single biggest amenity shift the Heights has been handed in years. It also isn't isolated. Read alongside the Famous Footwear that the Billings Gazette reported is heading in next to Target and Ross, and the ongoing conversation among Heights business owners about creating a new Tax Increment Financing district for the neighborhood, the story on Main Street this summer isn't about one grocery store. It's about the moment the "restaurant desert" line finally stops being the only thing anyone says about this side of town.
One block, three signals
If you drove Main Street on a Saturday in 2022 and again this July, three things at three different addresses would tell you the pace has changed.
At 1515 Main, the former Big Lots is now spoken for by a Livingston-founded, employee-owned grocery that already runs stores in Bozeman, Belgrade, Dillon, Lewistown, Billings, and Helena. The new Heights location will be slightly larger than the existing Grand Avenue store.
At 1414 Main, Burritos Don Chuy has quietly become a two-storefront family operation. The Martinez family opened Heart Beat Coffee and Ice Cream next door in summer 2025, selling paletas and Mexican street food alongside coffee. The same family owns Michoacan A Pedir De Boca in Bozeman.
At 815 Yellowstone River Road, just off Main, 1Ō5 Brewing has finished its first full year. Founder Travis Zeilstra, a Skyview High graduate who went on to lead brewing at Montana Brewing Company before running his own brewery in Wyoming, told KTVQ the whole point was a community gathering space the Heights had been missing. It remains the only brewery in the neighborhood.
Those three addresses sit within a two-mile stretch. None of them existed in this form four years ago.
Why the Town & Country address matters more than the square footage
A 30,000-square-foot grocery is a large store by Heights standards but not by Billings standards. The interesting number isn't the footprint. It's the location.
1515 Main sits on the artery every Heights household already drives. The most persistent complaint from Heights residents for a decade has been that a full grocery run required a trip down the Rims to a Grand Avenue or 24th Street West anchor. Town & Country is a specialty-leaning grocer with a strong Montana-product presence (Wheat Montana, Farver Farms, Marbled Beef out of a ranch near Billings) and a soup and salad bar that its Grand Avenue store is locally known for. Dropping that store into a Heights-primary address does something different than adding another chain drug store or dollar box: it converts a daily errand from a cross-town drive into a neighborhood stop.
Combine that with Famous Footwear arriving on the Target/Ross pad, and Main Street in the Heights starts to look less like a corridor residents pass through and more like one they finish errands on.
"The original intent was to create a community space located in the Heights for people to congregate and have conversations." Travis Zeilstra, 1Ō5 Brewing, to KTVQ
Zeilstra was talking about coffee and beer, not groceries. But the sentence describes the shift on Main Street as a whole. For years the Heights has had the households. It has rarely had the third places and daily-errand anchors that keep those households spending inside their own zip code.
The 1414 Main cluster and what it says about staying power
The Martinez family's setup at 1414 Main is worth looking at closely because it is the version of Heights growth that doesn't depend on a national chain deciding a market is finally big enough.
Burritos Don Chuy took a space that had cycled through Okinawa Sushi and other tenants. In summer 2025 the family opened Heart Beat Coffee and Ice Cream at the same address, doubling their footprint without moving. The shop sells paletas and locally made Mexican street food. A single family running two adjacent, complementary storefronts is a much stronger indicator of neighborhood demand than a corporate site-selection team green-lighting a Cupbop or a Cheba Hut on the West End. The Martinez operation is putting its own capital behind the read that the Heights can carry a sit-down and a specialty concept at the same intersection.
That is the piece of Main Street's story that gets missed when the conversation is only about the empty big boxes.
What has and hasn't changed on Main Street since 2024
A quick reference for anyone who has been away or just hasn't driven the street lately:
- 1515 Main: Big Lots closed. Town & Country Foods announced July 2026. Spring 2027 target.
- 1414 Main: Burritos Don Chuy continues; Heart Beat Coffee and Ice Cream added next door in summer 2025.
- Target/Ross pad: Famous Footwear announced as an incoming neighbor, per the Billings Gazette.
- 815 Yellowstone River Rd, off Main: 1Ō5 Brewing opened January 2025; in-house beer launched that spring; food-truck patio and events calendar have been active since.
- Longer-tenured Heights spots still on the map: Hokkaido Ramen House for izakaya-style ramen, Wild MT Coffee on the drive-through side, Guadalajara Heights, Blues BBQ, Bull Mountain Grille, Tippy Cow Cafe, MacKenzie River Pizza Co.
- What the neighborhood is still missing: a sit-down breakfast anchor, a full bookstore, and any real grocery competition until 2027.
None of that is the picture of a saturated corridor. It is the picture of one filling in.
The TIF question is the pace-setter
Everything above is happening without an urban renewal district in place. Heights business leaders spent the last year making the case that a new Tax Increment Financing area would let the neighborhood accelerate the same kind of building-conversion work that reshaped downtown's Montana Avenue and First Avenue North corridors. Downtown's Old Billings Hardware Building at 2802 Montana Avenue received TIF approval this year on the argument that the project would not have penciled without it.
The Heights version of that argument is that Main Street has the traffic and rooftops to support redevelopment, but the older commercial parcels between Bench Boulevard and Wicks Lane won't turn over at market pace without a similar push. Whether the city agrees will determine whether 2027 through 2029 looks like the current pace of a few announcements a year or something faster.
For a Heights resident, that is the number to watch through the fall. If a TIF district passes, expect the pace of announcements on and around Main to double. If it doesn't, the current organic pace, which is real but slow, is the pace.
What to actually try this month
If you have been meaning to walk a few of these blocks and haven't, a short Saturday sequence:
- Coffee at 1Ō5 Brewing on Yellowstone River Road. Sit on the patio if the food trucks are out.
- Late lunch at Burritos Don Chuy, then a paleta from Heart Beat next door.
- Loop down Main and note which storefronts between Bench Boulevard and Wicks Lane are papered over. Those are the parcels the TIF conversation is really about.
- If ramen sounds better than tacos, swap step two for Hokkaido Ramen House.
Two hours, one street, and a sharper picture of what the Heights is going to look like the next time someone asks you whether anything has changed up there.
The Heights has been the quiet half of Billings for a long time. It isn't going to stop being residential-first, and no one who lives here is asking it to. What's happening in 2026 is smaller and more useful than a boom: the daily errands are moving closer to the front door, and the family-run food side of Main Street is proving it can hold its own without waiting on a chain to validate the market.
If you own a home in the Heights and have been curious what these changes mean for what your property is worth this year, Heidi Brosovich and the team know this side of town street by street. Request a free home valuation and we'll give you a read that reflects what Main Street actually looks like this summer, not what it looked like the last time someone updated a comp sheet.
