The Six Weeks Clive Quietly Fixed Itself

A woman walking her dog along the Greenbelt Trail near Campbell Recreation Area on a Saturday morning in early August stopped short at a spot that had annoyed her for almost two years. The orange detour barrels were gone. So was the plywood sign that had rerouted trail traffic onto Lakeview Drive since October 2024, back when the Iowa DOT and the Waste Reclamation Authority started work on the I-80/35 bridge over Walnut Creek. The city's own construction notice had promised the closure would lift by early summer 2026, and on this particular Saturday, it looked like it finally had.

That single cleared detour would be a nice, small item on its own. But it landed in the middle of six weeks that also delivered a new $10.6 million park, a reopened marketplace on University Avenue, and the 50th year of a festival that's been running since before most of the subdivisions west of 100th Street existed. None of these things were planned as a package. That's the part worth sitting with. Clive isn't a place where big changes get announced with fanfare and a groundbreaking photo op years in advance. They tend to arrive quietly, on overlapping timelines that nobody coordinated, and then all show up at once.

The Bridge That Took Nearly Two Years

The Greenbelt Trail closure at the I-80/35 bridge started October 1, 2024, and the city said at the time it expected the detour to last through late spring or early summer 2026, pending both IDOT and the Waste Reclamation Authority staying on schedule. During the closure, the eastern approach still gave trail users access to Clive City Hall, the Clive Public Library, and the Aquatic Center, while the western detour started at Campbell Recreation Area on Woodlands Parkway. For anyone who uses this trail to get to work, to the library, or just to clear their head, that's nearly two years of rerouting around a single bridge.

The trail itself runs 7.9 miles from Lions Park to the Walnut Creek Trail connection near Windsor Heights, according to TrailLink's route data, and from there it links into the Raccoon River Valley Trail system heading west. It's not a fast trail. It's an urban one that follows the creek through wooded pockets, crosses under a handful of arterial roads, and gets crowded with dog walkers, families, and slower cyclists on any decent weekend. That's the trail people missed having whole for two years, and it's the trail that, by all indications, came back together right as summer set in.

What $10.6 Million Actually Bought

On July 17, the city held a ribbon-cutting for Greenbelt Landing, a 14.89-acre expansion on the east side of NW 114th Street, right outside the Aquatic Center. Construction was already visible the previous fall, when an earlier Business Record update put the total project cost at $10.6 million, with more than $3.5 million of that covered by grants and donor fundraising rather than the general fund.

What actually opened:

• The MidAmerican Energy Stage, an outdoor performance space for concerts and community events
• The Polk County Festival Grounds, giving the city a dedicated gathering space for larger events
• The Polk County Wetland Walk, an ADA-accessible boardwalk with fishing piers along Walnut Creek
• The Ashley Okland Star Playground, an inclusive playground donated by Variety, the Children's Charity of Iowa
• A redesigned Creekside Pavilion, the special events building that anchors the site

The timing wasn't an accident on the city's part, at least. The same ribbon-cutting doubled as the kickoff for the Clive Festival's 50th anniversary, held July 17 and 18 this year. A multi-year park expansion and a festival marking half a century landed on the exact same weekend. That's the kind of overlap that reads as coincidence until you notice it's the second time in a month that something with a years-long backstory finished right as something else started.

When a Building Emptied Overnight and Came Back in Three Months

The third piece moves at a completely different speed. Painted Tree Boutique, a national chain that leased space inside its buildings to small independent vendors, filed for bankruptcy across all its U.S. locations in April 2026. The Clive store, at 11101 University Avenue, closed without warning. According to Iowa Public Radio's reporting, more than 300 small businesses had been operating out of that single building when it shut down, and some vendors never received proceeds from sales made in the days before closure.

Knapp Properties, which owns the building, didn't wait for a new national tenant to come courting. It built its own replacement. Eleven101 Collective, named for the building's address, held its soft opening July 30 and 31, with roughly 100 independent vendors moving in, many of them the same businesses displaced from Painted Tree just three months earlier. Rose Ann Jordison's shop, Ivy Rose, is one of the returning names.

Knapp Properties CEO Chris Costa explained the decision this way:

"When Painted Tree closed, we saw hundreds of entrepreneurs suddenly lose an important part of their business overnight. We knew we couldn't simply sit back and watch that happen."

Costa also acknowledged the trust the new venture has to rebuild. Speaking about how abruptly the previous operator disappeared, he said some vendors never saw money owed to them from final sales, adding that the shutdown left "a little broken trust" behind. Eleven101 runs differently: the marketplace employs its own staff to handle sales and operations, so vendors can keep their shelves stocked without staffing the floor themselves. A formal grand opening is planned for this fall, once the building fills out further.

The Same Six Weeks, Laid Out

Look at that table sideways and the pattern is less about any single opening and more about response time. A multi-year public infrastructure project and a three-month private rescue of a retail building both landed in the same six-week window, for entirely unrelated reasons. One moved on government timelines shaped by grant cycles and construction seasons. The other moved as fast as a landlord could sign leases and hire staff. Neither waited for the other, and neither dragged.

A Saturday That Uses All of It

If you wanted to see the entire stretch in one outing, it would look something like this:

1. Start at Lions Park and head east on the Greenbelt Trail, now clear through the former bridge detour
2. Stop at Greenbelt Landing to walk the Polk County Wetland Walk and let kids loose on the Ashley Okland Star Playground
3. Check the schedule for anything booked at the MidAmerican Energy Stage before you plan an evening around it
4. Drive or bike over to 11101 University Avenue and spend an hour browsing Eleven101 Collective, where the vendor mix is still settling in ahead of the fall grand opening
5. Swing by the Clive Public Library to cast a vote in this year's Art Along the Trail exhibit, on view along the Greenbelt through the fall, with the winning piece added to the city's permanent collection at year's end

None of that requires a car ride out of town. That's arguably the actual story here. A community doesn't need a single splashy anchor project to feel different in a given summer. It needs a bridge that finally reopens, a park that finishes on budget with grant money doing real work, and a landlord willing to move fast when a chain retailer disappears without warning. Put those three things in the same six weeks and a regular August in Clive starts to look like the product of a lot of small, well-timed decisions rather than one big one.

If you're curious how any of this is showing up in what homes in Clive are actually selling for, or just want a second opinion on the neighborhood before your own next move, Steward Real Estate Group knows this stretch of University Avenue and the Greenbelt corridor as well as anyone working the west side of the metro. Schedule a consultation whenever you're ready to talk specifics.