For most of Travisso's history, "downtown" meant one place: the cluster of shops and bars along Bagdad Street in Old Town Leander, a few minutes east toward the older part of the city. That's still true today. What's changed is that it's no longer the only answer. A second district is rising along the 183A Toll corridor, built around Leander's MetroRail station, and it's designed to work nothing like Old Town does.
The name is Northline, and if you've driven past San Gabriel Parkway lately and noticed cranes where there used to be open land, you've been watching it happen in real time. This isn't a rezoning proposal or a rendering on a city council slide deck anymore. Construction is underway, the first residents have already moved in, and 2026 is the year the project stopped being a plan and started being a place.
What's Actually Built, and What's Still a Hole in the Ground
Northline covers 115 acres south of San Gabriel Parkway, wedged between US 183 and Toll 183A, sitting directly on the transit core at the northern end of the MetroRail line, which is where the project gets its name. The master plan calls for a mix that Old Town Leander was never built for: retail, office space, medical office, a hotel, civic buildings, multifamily housing, townhomes, and condos, all arranged as a walkable district rather than a strip along a highway.
Some of that is already real. The first residential phase, a set of multifamily apartment buildings and townhomes, is complete. The Brownstone at Northline townhomes, built by Novak, are on the market now, which means people are already living inside the district while the rest of it fills in around them. That's a different kind of construction timeline than most master-planned announcements, where residential comes last. Here it came first.
Retail is the piece still taking shape. Austin-based Endeavor Real Estate Group, the developer behind The Domain and Southpark Meadows, is building the first commercial phase along 183A Toll: roughly 85,000 square feet on an initial 17 acres, with room to grow into another 18 acres beyond that if the first phase leases up. Endeavor's other Austin projects lean heavily on walkable, food-forward retail, which is the model Northline's early materials describe as well.
The civic piece moved forward in February 2026, when Leander City Council approved an economic development agreement clearing the way for core municipal facilities to eventually relocate into the district. That's a bigger deal than it sounds. City Hall has sat in Old Town for decades. Moving it to Northline would give the new district an anchor of daily foot traffic that retail alone can't generate, the kind of built-in visitor base that turns a shopping strip into an actual downtown.
Old Town Still Runs on a Different Clock
None of this replaces Old Town Leander. It runs on an entirely different rhythm, and that rhythm isn't going anywhere.
Old Town's calendar is built around a handful of big annual gatherings rather than daily foot traffic. The Old Town Street Festival, this year held on June 6, draws crowds for live music, food trucks, and local vendor booths in a single concentrated day. The Old Town Christmas Festival does the same thing in December, with a tree lighting and a companion 5K that turns the historic streets into a course for a few hours. Between those anchor events, daily life happens at a small, fixed set of businesses: a pastry from Casa Costa Bake Shop, a burger at Moonie's Burger House, an evening at Maggie Mae's Old Town Pub. The city's own Old Town Master Plan, approved by council in 2023, is aimed at growing that footprint with more parking, a new Old Town Park, and looser zoning for bars and restaurants, but it's explicitly framed as preserving a small-town feel rather than turning Old Town into a daily-use commercial district.
That's the real distinction. Old Town is a destination you plan a trip around. Northline is being built as somewhere you stop on a Tuesday because it's on the way home.
What This Actually Changes for a Travisso Weekend
Here's the part that matters if you already live in Travisso and aren't shopping for anything: your everyday answer to "where do we go for dinner" or "where's the closest place to grab coffee that isn't a chain" has been limited for years to a short list, most of it outside Leander entirely, toward Cedar Park's 1890 Ranch or The Parke. Northline is the first attempt to put that kind of daily-use retail inside Leander's own borders, on the same 183A corridor Travisso residents already drive.
Inside the neighborhood, the calendar has already gotten fuller on its own. Travisso now runs two full amenity centers instead of one. The original Palazzo Clubhouse, at 9,200 square feet, has been the community's social hub for years, with its resort-style pool, fitness center, and lighted tennis and pickleball courts. The Forum, Travisso's second amenity center, held its grand opening on June 18, 2025, and added a different set of things to do on a Saturday: a pool with an in-pool tanning ledge, bocce and basketball courts, an outdoor yoga lawn, an indoor wellness studio, and a playground built around a zipline. Add in the neighborhood's own sports leagues and the small parks scattered through the community, like Monza Park and Terra Verde Park, and Travisso already has more reasons to stay inside its own gates on a given weekend than it did two years ago.
That's exactly why Northline matters more than a typical development story would suggest. A neighborhood with a full internal calendar doesn't need somewhere new to gather. What it needs is somewhere close to run the daily errands that a clubhouse can't handle: the dinner out, the coffee run, the dry cleaning drop-off. Old Town Leander was never built to carry that daily load, and it isn't trying to. Northline is being built specifically to.
The Practical Read for Right Now
If you're weighing which direction to point the car on a given evening, here's roughly where things stand as of this summer:
- Already open and lived in: the Brownstone at Northline townhomes, built by Novak, with residents on site now.
- Under active construction: the first 85,000-square-foot retail phase along 183A Toll, led by Endeavor Real Estate Group, with an additional 18 acres available for a future phase.
- Agreed but not yet moved: core city facilities, following the February 2026 economic development agreement, with no firm relocation date set publicly.
- Unchanged and still the destination for big annual events: Old Town Leander, anchored by the Old Town Street Festival, the Old Town Christmas Festival, and its cluster of longstanding small businesses.
None of that retail phase has opening dates attached yet, which is worth knowing before you plan an evening around it. What you can plan around today is a neighborhood that no longer has just one direction to drive when the Palazzo pool and The Forum's yoga lawn aren't what you're in the mood for.
Leander spent most of its growth as a place people commuted out of. Northline is the first real attempt to give it a center of its own, and Travisso happens to sit close enough to watch it get built in real time.
Questions about how Travisso's amenities, HOA structure, or the surrounding Leander corridor fit into your own plans for the neighborhood are the kind of thing we talk through with clients all the time at Thomas Luxury Group. Request a private consultation whenever you're ready.
