Ask a regular at Cooper's on 5th whether Valley Junction's brick storefronts and painted awnings are protected by some kind of historic preservation law, and most people will say yes without pausing to think about it. West Des Moines' own city code says otherwise. The look that makes 5th Street recognizable, and the reason a new building there tends to echo the old ones instead of ignoring them, has rested entirely on individual developers choosing to build that way. Nothing in the ordinance requires it. This year, the city council spent two separate workshops deciding whether that should change, and as of late September no vote has locked in an answer either way.
That gap between what people assume and what the code actually says is the real story behind everything else that happened in Valley Junction this year: the torn-up pavement, the new restaurants, and a handful of residents standing up at council meetings to ask what happens next on their own block.
What Just Finished Under Those Cones
If you've spent the summer detouring around orange cones near the alleys or noticing fresh pavement on 5th Street itself, that work wrapped up in stages. The city's construction updates page shows Phase 10 of the Valley Junction alley paving project, covering the 200 block between Maple and Elm along with the cross alleys at 2nd-3rd, 7th-8th, and 8th-9th Streets, as substantially complete by July 29, 2026. A separate resurfacing project on 5th Street itself, along with work on South 50th Street, the 4th Street intersection at Walnut, and Mills Civic Parkway, was reported finished as of July 1, 2026, with final restoration still being cleaned up. Neither project closed the district down. The farmers market ran its normal Thursday season through the construction, and the businesses along 5th Street stayed open the whole time.
What the finished pavement actually represents is a multi-year streetscape investment closing out at the exact moment the city is deciding something much bigger about the buildings lining it.
The Guidelines Were Always Optional
Here's the part that surprises people who assume Valley Junction's character is locked in by ordinance. In February 2022, the city council approved design guidelines for the mixed-use commercial spine along 5th Street, developed with the planning firm Teska Associates and the Historic West Des Moines Master Plan Steering Committee, a 19-member group representing both business and resident nonprofits in the district. The council widened that guidance later the same year to cover the Historic Business District, the Railroad Avenue District, and the Mixed Industrial District as well, according to the city's own plans and studies page.
Guidelines are recommendations, not requirements. A developer can read them, agree they make sense, and build something completely different, and nothing in the current zoning ordinance stops that from happening. The city's own planning staff has said as much in public materials: making the guidelines mandatory rather than advisory would require an actual amendment to the zoning code, not a simple swap from "recommended" language to "required" language.
Two Workshops This Year, No Vote Yet
That's exactly what the council started sorting through at a May 4, 2026 workshop. According to the city's active development projects page, Planning Administrator Linda Schemmel walked the council through how historic properties get identified and introduced a potential regulatory approach that would apply clear, enforceable standards specifically to designated historic properties inside the Valley Junction Historic Business District, while leaving more flexible compatibility standards for everything else nearby.
The council came back to Historic Valley Junction at a second workshop on July 20, 2026, this time looking at a proposed Planned Unit Development framework covering a much larger area, bounded by University Avenue, I-235, I-80, and 22nd Street. The PUD is meant to enable gradual reinvestment by allowing a mix of retail, housing, office, and entertainment uses while addressing aging infrastructure and underused sites in that zone. It's a different tool than the May workshop's design-guideline question, but it points at the same underlying decision: how much room a developer gets once a project sits inside Historic Valley Junction's boundary.
Neither workshop ended in a vote. The city hasn't posted a follow-up meeting date, which means the design guidelines adopted in 2022 remain advisory for new construction on 5th Street as of this writing.
What Residents Told the Council Directly
The debate isn't purely academic for everyone in the district. At a January 20, 2026 meeting, resident Aaron Ramar Ashelman asked the council to publish a plain-language summary of a developer rendering that had circulated near Valley Junction, saying the lack of clear information was creating confusion in the neighborhood, according to a summary of the meeting record. Mayor Russ Trimble responded that the rendering wasn't an approval and that the council first needed to define what would be allowed in the district's transition zones.
"We first have to figure out what is going to be allowed and not allowed in these transition zones," Mayor Trimble told the council.
A March 2026 meeting brought a more specific concern. Resident Sarah Kavan told the council that three houses across 4th Street had been purchased by an investor, one already vacated, and asked whether the city could deny demolition permits to preserve the block's historic character, per the meeting summary. Kavan said the investor bought the properties "for cash." Trimble and other council members acknowledged the city currently lacks a legal mechanism to outright block a property owner from seeking a demolition permit, even one they'd prefer to see preserved.
That's the practical stakes behind the design-guideline debate. It isn't only about whether a new storefront gets the right brick pattern. It's about whether a property owner across 4th Street can tear down a house tomorrow with no zoning tool standing in the way.
Two Buildings, Two Bets
The clearest illustration of what's currently allowed sits a few blocks apart on 5th Street itself. The building that once housed The Longest Yard sports bar at 122 5th Street was deemed structurally unsafe and demolished in 2024 after sitting vacant for two years, described by neighboring businesses as an eyesore in reporting from WHO13. The city later approved a development agreement with restaurant developer Tom Baldwin, who grew up a few blocks from the site, to build a new structure there. Ryan Moffatt, the city's director of community and economic development, called the outcome "a good outcome to an unfortunate situation" in reporting from the Business Record. The city's development tracker had listed construction as expected to start in 2025 and finish in early 2026, though that timeline hasn't been publicly updated with a confirmed completion date, so the building's current status is worth checking on foot rather than assuming from the record.
Elsewhere in the district, business turnover has kept moving on its own schedule. T12 Distillery took over the former distillery space at 111 S. 11th Street in late May 2026. On University Avenue, Guesthouse Tavern and Oyster, open since February 2024, sits next to Barn Town Brewing under the same ownership group. Further out, three more storefronts expanded their footprints in 2026: La Michoacána Mexican Groceries added roughly 1,700 square feet to grow its kitchen and seating, outdoor cooking retailer BW Outdoors moved into a larger space on Elm Street, and Tulip Bloom Boutique doubled its own space earlier in the year, according to Axios Des Moines coverage of the district's expansion wave. None of that growth required anyone to follow a historic design template. It happened because individual owners chose to reinvest in buildings they already occupied.
Put those two examples side by side and the pattern becomes clear. Some development in Valley Junction leans toward the district's history because the people building it want to. None of it is required to. Whatever the council decides about mandatory guidelines will determine whether that stays a choice or becomes a rule.
Where to Watch Next
The council hasn't scheduled a vote, so the guidelines stay advisory until it acts. Anyone who wants to track this directly can follow the active development projects page, where workshop presentations get posted after each session. The next building that goes up on 5th Street, whichever direction its owner chooses to take it, will say more about how this settles than any council discussion has so far. For a broader look at what else has opened along that stretch this year, we've mapped the wider West Des Moines food and drink cluster in an earlier post.
If you're weighing what any of this means for a specific address in the district, whether you already call Valley Junction home or you're just trying to understand a neighborhood you drive through, Erika Hansen knows this stretch of West Des Moines block by block. Schedule a free consultation to talk through what's actually changing here and what it means for the property you're watching.
