An East Bay August: The Quiet Reorganization of Traverse City's East Side

Drive US-31 from Avenue B to Holiday Road on a Wednesday morning in August, and the corridor still reads the way it has for years. Motels, marinas, a bait shop, a car wash, the state park campground pressed up against four lanes of traffic. Look closer and something has shifted. Orange cones are up on Three Mile Road. A farmers market has quietly become a Saturday habit. Two township boards that had never met together are now in the same room drafting a 20-year plan for the strip of asphalt out your front window.

The east side is not becoming a different place. It is becoming a more legible one, and August 2026 happens to be the month several years of planning show up as actual construction, actual restaurants, and actual dates on a calendar. Here is what a resident who already lives on this side of the bay would want to know is happening between the state park and Holiday Road right now.

The groundbreaking most neighbors missed

On August 3, East Bay Township broke ground on the Safe Routes to School project along the Three Mile and Hammond corridors. The nearly $2.7 million investment will create 1.6 miles of new non-motorized infrastructure designed to improve safety for students and residents. The trail design features a 10-foot-wide shared-use path along the Three Mile Road and Hammond Road corridors, with sidewalk connections to the East Bay Branch Library, Cherry Knoll and St. Elizabeth Ann Seton Middle School.

If you have been on Three Mile at school pickup, you already know the current problem. There is no continuous shoulder wide enough to walk. That changes this construction season. Signage will be installed to reduce vehicle speeds from 55 mph to 35 mph during student arrival and dismissal periods, and the Hammond and Three Mile intersection is getting ADA-accessible crossings plus a Rectangular Rapid Flashing Beacon. Work will be coordinated with the Grand Traverse County Road Commission's Hammond Road reconstruction project, so expect the two projects to move together through fall.

A companion piece was on the township board's agenda a week later. The East Bay Corners Civic Plaza was scheduled for Township Board consideration on Aug. 10. Designed by Beckett & Raeder, the plaza would be located on an easement from True North and feature seating, picnic tables, a bicycle fix-it station and native landscaping.

What the corridor plan actually rearranged

The trail work is one visible piece of a much larger reorganization. In late 2025 the township formed a Corridor Improvement Authority for what officials are calling the East Bay Beach District. The district stretches roughly from Avenue B to Holiday Road. Like other TIF types, a CIA functions not as a new tax or a tax increase, but a tax capture. The district sets a base year for taxable values on properties within the CIA, and then captures the difference as those values increase over time.

The plan behind it is unusually specific about what it wants to build:

The Beach District TIF plan has a lifespan of 20 years and is intended to fund projects like a Four Mile/US-31 intersection pedestrian crosswalk, completion of the US-31 sidewalk network, year-round sidewalk maintenance, a community pier at the end of Four Mile on Grand Traverse Bay, and a new pedestrian bridge over US-31.

The economics tell the story better than the mission statement does. Officials are proposing a tax increment financing district that could generate roughly $6.5 million over 20 years toward a much larger, $46 million vision for the US-31 corridor. The district spans 781 acres and includes 1,635 parcels, 663 commercial properties and more than 1,000 residential units, roughly 87% of which are condominiums.

That condo number is the one to sit with. When 87 percent of the residential parcels along a corridor are condominiums, the vision of a walkable, sidewalk-connected district is not an abstraction. It describes the daily reality of the people who already own here. The pier at the end of Four Mile is the piece worth watching most closely. The community pier project at the end of Four Mile Road is a 2026 priority. The township applied for a coastal management feasibility and engineering grant, with an announcement expected in October.

The plan has taken hits. Both Grand Traverse County and BATA have committed to good faith negotiations for developing an agreement with East Bay Township, which Township Supervisor Beth Friend hopes will lead to alternative funding structures for the Beach District. Read that as: the taxing jurisdictions opted out of the TIF, and the township is working on side agreements. The projects are not dead, but the funding stack is still being assembled.

The Saturday rotation

While the corridor plan grinds through public hearings, the resident-facing version of the same idea already opened. The East Bay Corners Farmers Market runs on Saturday mornings out of the township office campus at the Hammond and Three Mile intersection, and vendor applications for the 2026 season opened on March 16.

A working August Saturday on the east side, without ever crossing US-31 into town:

• Coffee and the farmers market at East Bay Corners
• TART Trail east from the state park toward Acme, or west into town if you want the ride
• A sandwich stop at Bayside Market for a beach day, then locally smoked bites at Smoke & Porter
• Swim at East Bay Park in the afternoon, sunset from the deck at Bayview Inn or from Bayside Park in Acme

Weeknight tables that are not on Front Street

The east side is where the last twelve months of Traverse City restaurant openings have quietly rearranged what a Tuesday night looks like without driving downtown. Hopscotch Brick Oven and Taproom opened in a long-vacant former t-shirt shop in East Bay Township. Matt and Mark Davies, owners of Peninsula Grill, Western Avenue Grill, Bad Dog Deli, and Riverwalk Grill and Taproom, opened Hopscotch at 2032 US-31 next to Don's Drive In. The eatery features a brick-fired oven serving up pizza, charcuterie and sandwiches, a smoker for ribs, wings and other smoked meats, 16 tap handles for craft beer, and an extensive whiskey and bourbon list.

The pairing with Don's is the piece a visitor would miss. A drive-in that has been serving root beer floats since long before the corridor plan existed now sits next door to a brick-oven taproom. That is a single block doing two eras of American road food, and the sidewalk that will eventually stitch them together is what the CIA plan is spending twenty years to build.

Mt. Holiday in August

The ski hill on Holiday Road stopped being a winter-only operation years ago, and the trajectory has continued. Significant upgrades are underway at the 45-acre campus of Mt. Holiday in East Bay Township, which held a community visioning session to explore more year-round uses for the property, including expanded cycling trails and programs. The nonprofit is transitioning off its old well system onto township municipal water, which unlocks both snowmaking and a fire suppression system in the lodge.

For August residents, the practical read is that the mountain is not idle. Watch the events calendar out of Mt. Holiday and Norte Youth Cycling. Following the completion of the trail, Norte will provide pedestrian and bicycle safety education for students, supported by a $75,000 Safe Routes to School grant from the Michigan Fitness Foundation.

Aug. 8 on the water

The one big August date on the East Bay side of the water is not a festival. The Swim for Grand Traverse Bay is an open water swim event on Saturday, August 8, 2026, to benefit The Watershed Center Grand Traverse Bay, a non-profit that works to protect the bay and its 1,000-square-mile watershed. Staging is on the West Bay side at Greilickville Harbor Park, but the swimmers you see grinding out training miles in the calmer water off East Bay Park through July are training for this.

If you want to watch rather than swim, East Bay Park is the low-key option most out-of-town visitors skip. The park sits at the base of Old Mission Peninsula facing the east arm of the bay. Nestled in a residential area, most people who go live in the area or are locals. It has a small beach, a boat landing suitable for pontoon boats or small skiffs, a small playground, a free parking area, and restroom facilities, plus a view of east bay.

Dates worth circling

The Northwestern Michigan Fair in Traverse City is a multi-day event at 3606 Blair Town Hall Rd, Traverse City, and is the one August tradition that predates every corridor plan and civic plaza design meeting by more than a century.

The read for east side homeowners

The pattern under all of this is worth naming. The Beach District is the first stretch of the greater Traverse City area to be planned as a resident district rather than a tourist strip. The pier, the sidewalk stitching, the school-hour speed zones, the farmers market at the township office instead of at the state park, the civic plaza on a gas station easement, the trail extension that arrives at a conservancy property rather than at a hotel entrance. These are the pieces of infrastructure a place builds when it decides the audience is the people already sleeping there.

That is a meaningful shift for a corridor whose property values have historically been pulled up by the state park, the beach hotels, and downtown proximity rather than by anything east of US-31 itself. Homeowners in the condo-heavy stretch along the corridor have the most to gain from the sidewalk and pier work, because those improvements attach directly to their front doors. Owners on the residential streets north of Hammond and around Mt. Holiday get a quieter benefit: a school route that finally has a path, and a ski hill that is now a four-season neighbor.

If you own on the east side and you are thinking about what any of this means for what your home is worth or what selling looks like when the sidewalks and pier are actually in the ground, that is a conversation worth having with a specialist who is tracking the projects parcel by parcel. Michigan LifeStyle Homes works with east-side owners on exactly that kind of analysis. Request a Private Consultation and we will walk the corridor plan against your address.