Drive Smokey Park Highway after dark and you'll pass the fenced lot at Enka Heritage Parkway where the ground has sat cleared and quiet for more than a year, the old clock tower rising behind it like a landmark waiting for a headline. Keep going another half mile and you'll hit two lit-up parking lots that weren't there a year ago, both usually full by 6 p.m.
That contrast is the actual story of this corridor right now. The project everyone in Candler has been asking about for eighteen months is finally getting a vote. The changes nobody had to vote on already happened.
The Vote Everyone's Been Waiting For
On September 11, Costco submitted a revised development application for the long-discussed warehouse near the Enka Clock Tower, and the numbers shifted again: an approximately 166,800-square-foot retail warehouse on 39.67 acres at 264 and 274 Enka Heritage Parkway, near Sand Hill Road, according to Fox Carolina. The plan includes a 32-pump fueling station under a canopy, underground fuel tanks, 914 parking spaces, and 84 bicycle spaces.
The application now has an actual runway. It goes before the Asheville Planning and Zoning Commission on October 7, then to City Council for a final vote on October 13. For a project that has spent a year and a half in continuances, that's the first hard calendar this thing has had.
Eighteen Months of Continuances, and Why
The timeline is worth laying out plainly, because it explains something the vote date alone doesn't: this was never really a fight about whether Candler wants a Costco. It was a fight about dirt.
| When | What happened |
|---|---|
| March 2025 | Developers hold a pre-application sketch plan meeting with the city; conditional zoning required because the project exceeds 100,000 square feet |
| November 2025 | Technical Review Committee hearing, originally set for October 6, pushed to November 3, then to November 17 |
| January 2026 | Planning and Zoning Commission hearing pushed to February 4; residents who'd been tracking the project for nearly a year show up anyway |
| February 2026 | Commission grants a second continuance, citing unresolved questions about which road ties into which and who owns it |
| September 2026 | Revised application submitted with updated square footage and acreage; hearings scheduled for October 7 and October 13 |
The February delay is the one that tells you the most. A developer representative explained to the commission that the site's roads cross jurisdictions, with a city street meeting a state highway, and that the team was working with the North Carolina Department of Transportation and the Metropolitan Sewerage District to sort out ownership before design could move forward. That's not a zoning fight. That's an easement problem.
The September filing adds another layer. The parcel sits on the old American Enka footprint, the same site that made this corner of Candler synonymous with rayon manufacturing for most of the twentieth century, and it carries designated Areas of Possible Contamination under state brownfield agreements and Department of Environmental Quality land-use restrictions. Because the property is a former industrial brownfield with no existing tree cover, Costco is asking the city for a technical modification exempting the project from standard tree canopy preservation rules and the fee that normally comes with them. There's also the matter of Hominy Creek, which runs close enough to the site to factor into the design.
None of that is political. It's the kind of compliance work that happens quietly, on paper, long before anyone gets to vote on anything. The October dates are the finish line of that process, not the start of a new debate.
The Corridor That Didn't Wait for a Vote
While the warehouse sat in review, the rest of Smokey Park Highway kept moving at a completely different speed.
Scratch Ankle Fillin' Station opened at 811 Smokey Park Highway on December 12, 2025. The name borrows an old local nickname for this stretch of Enka-Candler, and the spot leans into it with a rotating food truck lineup rather than a fixed kitchen, pulling from Benny's Pizza, 6 Pigs, Bell Buoy Seafood, and Faithful Flames on different nights. It's open 1 to 10 p.m. Monday through Saturday and 1 to 8 p.m. on Sunday.
Half a mile up the road at 1007 Smokey Park Highway, Ocha Thai opened January 6, less than a month later. The menu runs from $9 appetizers like calamari and Thai hot wings up to $22 to $32 entrees, including Pla Neung Manao, a whole steamed red snapper with lime and chili, and Pla Rad Prik, the same fish deep-fried and topped with sweet chili sauce. It's closed Sundays, open 11 to 3 and 5 to 9 the rest of the week.
Two restaurants opening within a month of each other and a half mile apart isn't a coincidence so much as a signal. It joined a corridor that already had its own regulars: Griff's Kitchen & Bar, known locally for its bulgogi fries and a poutine that shows up on more than one neighbor's short list, Dripolator Candler for the daily coffee run, and Miami Restaurant, the kind of breakfast spot longtime residents mention with slight embarrassment that they still haven't made it there themselves, because you have to get there early before the tables fill.
None of those businesses needed a Technical Review Committee hearing. They needed a lease, a health inspection, and a soft open.
What the Gap Actually Tells You
Put the two timelines side by side and the lesson isn't that big projects are bad or that small businesses are better. It's that they run on entirely different clocks, and confusing one for the other is how people end up either impatient or caught off guard.
A storefront restaurant can go from empty space to full parking lot in a matter of weeks. A 39-acre brownfield parcel with creek proximity, contested road ownership, and a formal state remediation agreement takes years to clear before a single permit gets issued, regardless of how the City Council vote goes on October 13. The rayon plant that once employed thousands here left behind more than a clock tower worth saving. It left behind soil conditions that still shape what can and can't go up on that ground today, and how fast.
If you live along this corridor, the practical read is simple. The restaurant scene will keep changing on short notice, the way it always has here. The warehouse, if it clears both October hearings, still has a Technical Review Committee process ahead of it before anyone breaks ground. Watch the small stuff for what's actually different next month. Watch the big stuff for what's different next year.
Candler has always been the kind of place that changes by accretion rather than announcement, one storefront and one zoning docket at a time. That's still true this fall. It's just easier to see the pattern when both clocks are ticking at once.
If you're curious what a specific pocket of Candler or the wider Enka corridor looks like right now, from what's selling to what a given parcel's history might mean for future use, Asheville Land & Luxury is always glad to talk it through. Connect for a curated consultation whenever you're ready.
