In July, some details slipped out regarding plans for the 30-acre former Little Rock Sears campus at Interstate 630 and South University Avenue, when Dallas-based firm Shop Companies briefly posted on its website, shopcompanies.com/properties/shops-university-village, a site plan for The Shops at University Village, a mixed-use development, that showed a multi-story hotel, retail shops and five restaurants.
That posting disappeared in a hurry once it attracted media attention, but now we have more concrete, official plans for the redevelopment, now called The District at Midtown.
Shop Companies is planning about 56,000 square feet of retail that includes two hotels and multiple spaces for as yet unidentified restaurants. The multimillion-dollar project also includes a reconfiguration of an on-ramp to Interstate 630, cutting off direct westbound access from University Avenue and creating an access road.
The leak in July listed several chain restaurants that didn't yet have central Arkansas outlets, including Baton Rouge-based Raising Cane's Chicken Fingers, which has two outlets in Fayetteville, one in Rogers and one in Texarkana, and Irving, Texas-based Uncle Julio's (Mexican From Scratch), which operates some 30 restaurants in seven states (Texas, Georgia, Illinois, Maryland, Virginia, Florida and Tennessee), along with Chili's, Starbucks and Panda Express (which has restaurants in Searcy and Hot Springs).
The most recent proposal doesn't list any specific eateries.