If you've toured a home in Rough Hollow or anywhere in Lakeway's newer sections over the past two years, there's a good chance someone showed you a rendering. A five-minute walk to a park. A Main Street with retail, a hotel, restaurants, maybe a rooftop bar. The pitch is that Lakeway is finally getting the walkable center it's lacked for decades, and that your home will sit close enough to benefit.
Ask when it opens, though, and the answer keeps moving. It has moved four times since the project broke ground.
That's not a criticism of the developer or the city. It's a fact worth understanding before you weigh how much a "coming soon" amenity should factor into what you pay, because the reason for the slippage isn't bad planning. It's a funding gap that the city itself was never built to close quickly, and once you see the mechanism, you'll read every other "town center coming soon" pitch in the Hill Country differently.
A City That Has Never Written A Check For Growth
The project is called The Square at Lakeway now. For most of its life it was The Square at Lohmans, named for its address at 1935 Lohmans Crossing Road. The Lakeway City Council approved the planned unit development back in October 2021, laying out a 63-acre mix of residences, office space, retail, a new Main Street, and public open space. Austin-based Legend Communities broke ground in November 2022 with an estimated one-year timeline for the first phase.
Here's the part that explains everything since. Lakeway has never in its history approved a Chapter 380 agreement, a tax abatement, or any formal economic development incentive. The city grew for decades on the strength of its residential tax base and its desirability alone, without ever needing to subsidize a developer to build something. That track record is exactly why, when Legend Communities came to the city in January 2026 asking for a $46.9 million incentive package spread over 35 years, the request stalled. There was no existing framework to evaluate it against. The city hadn't done this before.
The amendment history tells the same story from a different angle. Since the original approval, the project has needed:
- Amendment 1, approved September 2023
- Amendment 2, approved June 2024
- Amendment 3, approved in 2025
- Amendment 4, approved January 20, 2026, which pushed the Main Street completion deadline from June 30, 2026 to January 31, 2027
Four amendments in roughly four years, each one citing delays tied to utility relocation and coordination between multiple developers on the same tract. Mayor Thomas Kilgore summed up the incentive discussion after the developer withdrew its request from the January 20 agenda:
"There's still an economic request out there, we did a lot of work on a 380 agreement. I'm not sure we really got anywhere. I think we learned we didn't know what we didn't know."
Legend founder Haythem Dawlett gave his own account of where the time went, pointing to utility relocation as the root cause: moving the utilities meant revising the plans, and that alone cost the project close to two years, with the residential phase backing up everything that came after it.
The Half Of City Center That's Actually Moving
Here's a detail that a headline-only read of this project would miss entirely. Not all of City Center is stalled. The Square at Lakeway is only one piece of a larger area that also includes The Oaks at Lakeway Phase II, developed by Stratus Properties on the section closer to the H-E-B, and Tuscan Village on the section behind the police department.
The Oaks portion has kept moving on a normal construction cadence. Bridge girders for its section of Main Street were installed in early June 2026, with concrete work following later that month. That's the eastern stretch of the project, the part not tangled up in the incentive negotiation.
The lesson isn't that Legend Communities is behind and Stratus is ahead. It's that a single line on a map, "City Center," can be hiding two very different funding structures and two very different timelines. If your agent or a listing describes a home as being near "the new City Center," ask which developer's section they mean, because the answer changes what you should expect and when.
What A Reopened Restaurant Reveals About A Stalled Main Street
Haythem Dawlett's name shows up in a second story from this year, and the contrast is instructive.
Canyon Grille, the restaurant perched above the Rough Hollow Yacht Club and Marina, closed on April 6, 2026 and reopened just eight days later, on April 14, under Dawlett's ownership with a new farm-to-table concept built around Hill Country and Gulf Coast sourcing. Tony Curtis-Wellings, who previously founded Faraday's Kitchen Store in Bee Cave before it closed in 2025, came on as director of operations to lead the shift.
Eight days from closure to reopening, versus a Main Street that's been in some phase of "in the works" since the 2010s. The difference isn't ambition or capital. It's that a restaurant renovation is a private project on private land with no PUD amendment, no council vote, and no utility relocation running through a shared easement. The Square at Lakeway needs all three, plus coordination with the two water districts serving the tract, before a single retail tenant can sign a lease.
If you're weighing how quickly a promised amenity will actually show up, this is the question to ask: is it a private build on land the developer fully controls, or a public infrastructure project that has to move through a city council that's still building its own rulebook for how to fund growth like this?
What This Means If You're Comparing Rough Hollow To Other Communities
None of this changes what Rough Hollow already delivers. The 294-slip marina, the Highland Village amenity campus with its lazy river and adults-only pool, and the yacht club itself operate independently of the City Center project and always have. That part of the pitch is real today, not pending.
What's worth recalibrating is anything tied to the future Main Street specifically: walkability to retail, a second dining option beyond Canyon Grille, office space that might bring daytime foot traffic. Residential construction on the Legend Communities portion is expected to start later in 2026 according to Dawlett, with the second phase not beginning until late 2027. Treat those as developer estimates, not fixed dates, given the amendment history.
On pricing, be equally careful about which number you're handed. Trailing 12-month data through June 2026 puts the median closed price in Rough Hollow at $880,000 across 85 sales, with sellers averaging 96.71% of list price and a median 59 days on market. A single recent month's snapshot from a national portal put the average sale price closer to $700,000, down sharply year over year, with days on market north of 100. Both can be true at once. They're measuring different windows and different mixes of homes, which is exactly why a headline figure without its time frame attached tells you very little. Ask for the specific period behind any number someone quotes you, the same way you'd ask which developer's section of City Center they mean.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does the City Center delay affect Rough Hollow's HOA or amenities? No. The Rough Hollow Yacht Club and Marina and the Highland Village amenity campus are separate from City Center and operate on their own schedules. The delay is specific to the Square at Lakeway parcel on Lohmans Crossing Road.
If the incentive request was withdrawn, does that mean the project is dead? No. The city council approved its first formal economic development incentive policy on June 15, 2026, giving staff a framework to evaluate future requests. As of the mayor's July 2026 community update, funding remained the primary obstacle, but the city and developer were still in active discussion.
Should I avoid buying near City Center until it's finished? That depends entirely on what you're buying for. If lake access, the marina, and Lake Travis ISD schools are your priorities, those exist now. If a walkable retail core is part of your decision, build in a longer runway than any current rendering suggests, and ask specifically which section of the project a given timeline refers to.
If you're comparing Rough Hollow to other Hill Country communities and want to know exactly what's built versus what's still on paper, that's the kind of groundwork Casey Marquez walks clients through before they write an offer. Let's Connect.
