Drive past Oracle and Tangerine on any weekday and you will see the same thing you have seen for months: a chain-link perimeter around raw dirt where Best Buy used to sit, a crane parked near the old Dick's Sporting Goods pad, and a new tunnel entrance cut into the ground near Water Harvest Way that most people still slow down to figure out. If you have lived in Oro Valley for more than a few years, you already know the feeling this center gives off. Half the parking lot works. The other half looks like it is waiting for something that never quite arrives.
What most regulars have never had explained to them is why. The easy explanation is the one you hear at the Walmart checkout line: the economy, online shopping, bad luck. The actual explanation, on record from the people who built the place, is stranger and more specific. Oro Valley Marketplace was not undersized. It was built for a bigger town than the one that showed up.
The math nobody explained
The Marketplace sprawls across 114 acres with roughly 800,000 square feet of retail space, anchored for years by a busy Walmart Supercenter while Best Buy and Dick's Sporting Goods packed up and left. That is a lot of square footage for a town of Oro Valley's actual size, and Jim Horvath, chairman of Town West Companies, has said as much in plain terms. Speaking about the redevelopment, Horvath pointed to the math directly: getting 1,200 to 1,500 residents living on the property itself is what finally gives the retail and restaurants next door a built-in customer base instead of a commuting one.
That is the part locals tend to miss when they complain that the Marketplace never fills up. The vacancies were not really a marketing problem. They were a rooftop problem. A center this size needs people sleeping within walking distance of it, and until recently, nobody was.
Bob Lopez, who has lived in Oro Valley for three years and mostly uses the Marketplace for grocery runs, put the resident's version of the same complaint to a local news crew last fall: he likes a couple of the restaurants there but thinks the center needs better options, and he suspects the town's retirement-heavy population is part of why growth stalled. He is not wrong about the demographics. He is also, without quite saying it, describing the same rooftop gap Horvath was trying to solve.
What's already open and worth a Saturday
While the apartments and infrastructure work continue, the Marketplace has not been standing still on the tenant side. A few spots are already worth the trip if you have not been in a while.
- The Hoppy Vine, at 12125 N. Oracle Road, is Oro Valley's only dedicated craft beer and wine taproom. Owners Hector and Marnel Martinez opened it in November 2022 with a patio that looks out at the mountains, and they still let you bring in outside food if you want to pair a burrito with a flight of local beer. Dogs and kids are welcome on the patio.
- Stacks Book Club, run by Crispin and Lizzy Jeffrey-Franco, bet on the Marketplace's future before construction crews ever showed up, and Crispin has said the redevelopment's live-shop concept is exactly why they picked this location.
- Happy Joe's Pizza and Ice Cream opened this spring with a small arcade attached, aiming squarely at families. Manager Jessica Gonzalez has said the goal is simple: give people a reason to stay in Oro Valley instead of driving elsewhere for the evening, especially once the snowbirds who already knew about the place head home for the summer.
- The Century Theatres movie theater and the Walmart Supercenter remain the anchors most people already build a routine around, whether that is a matinee or the weekly grocery run.
- As of last fall, Martinez was also expecting a new neighbor a few doors down past Charred Pie: a tea room, still filling in what has been one of the center's long-empty storefronts.
The construction timeline, laid out plainly
Here is what has actually happened and what is still ahead, based on the town's own updates and reporting from KGUN 9 and KOLD News 13 over the past year.
| Phase | What it involves | Timing |
|---|---|---|
| Encantada at Oro Valley Marketplace | 320-unit apartment community south of Tangerine Road | Broke ground October 2025, expected complete mid-to-late 2027 |
| Pedestrian tunnel | Underpass beneath Water Harvest Way connecting apartment areas on both sides | Built November through December 2025 |
| Water Harvest Way upgrades | Intersection improvements starting near In-N-Out and moving toward Oracle Road | Began January 2026, ongoing through the year |
| Community park | New green space and playground between Walmart and Tuk Tuk Thai | Groundbreaking November 2025, playground equipment visible by spring 2026 |
None of this has been invisible. Temporary lane restrictions and truck traffic along Water Harvest Way have been part of the deal since grading started, and the town has been upfront that full, unrestricted access gets prioritized around Thanksgiving and the December holidays each year rather than left to chance.
Why apartments come first, not restaurants
If you are in the Bob Lopez camp and wondering why the fix isn't simply better restaurant recruitment, the answer traces back to the same rooftop math. Town Manager Jeff Wilkins has framed the investment as one meant to make the center safer and more enjoyable to walk through while also bringing in more residents to support the retailers already there. That ordering matters. A shopping center this size cannot recruit its way to full occupancy when the daytime population passing through never matches the square footage built to serve it. Adding roughly 1,200 to 1,500 people who live on-site, shop for groceries on-site, and walk to the movie theater on-site changes the math for every existing tenant without a single new restaurant lease being signed. The restaurants Lopez wants are more likely to show up once that built-in customer base exists, not before.
What to expect on your next trip
For now, day to day life at the Marketplace looks like construction fencing near the former Best Buy and Dick's pads, a functioning pedestrian tunnel if you are cutting between the two sides of Water Harvest Way, and intersection work that has been creeping toward Oracle Road since January. The park between Walmart and Tuk Tuk Thai has playground equipment up already, even if it is not yet a finished, shaded gathering spot. None of the current disruption should keep you from a Friday movie at Century Theatres or a slice at Happy Joe's, and the town has made a point of restoring full access during the highest-traffic weekends of the year.
The longer arc points toward something the developers are now calling Oro Valley Village Center, with plans for what they describe as an entertainment district anchored by a public gathering space they've named the Oro Valley Village Oasis Park, meant to include walking paths, playgrounds, and art and music programming alongside the existing retail. Whether that vision lands as described is still a few years out. What is already true is that the emptiness you have been driving past was never a permanent condition. It was a design built for a town Oro Valley had not yet become, and the fix currently underway is an attempt to grow the town onto the property itself rather than wait for it to arrive on its own.
If you have questions about how neighborhood investment like this tends to play out over time in Oro Valley, or what it signals about the surrounding area, the Brenda O'Brien Team has spent more than three decades watching this corner of the valley change and is always glad to talk through what we're seeing on the ground.
