Walk the Avenue of the Fountains this month and something looks different from a year ago. A storefront near the corner of Avenue of the Fountains and Verde River Drive that sat as a quiet professional office for years now has butcher paper on the windows and a soft-open sign. Two doors down, a grocery that used to fit in a space the size of a two-car garage has spread into something roughly the size of a small restaurant. Neither of these openings happened because a landlord got lucky with tenants. They happened because the Town of Fountain Hills rewrote the rules for what can go on the ground floor of downtown, and this fall is the first stretch where you can actually watch the new rules take effect.
In April, the Town Council adopted a Downtown Overlay District that changes how ground-floor space along the Avenue gets used going forward. The requirement is specific: over time, ground-floor spaces along the Avenue of the Fountains are meant to be occupied primarily by restaurants, retail shops, or entertainment venues, not offices or vacant leaseholds waiting on the right tenant. Existing businesses aren't forced out. A law office that's been there for a decade gets to stay a law office. But when a lease turns over, when a space goes vacant, when a new tenant signs on, that's where the new zoning kicks in and steers the next tenant toward something a resident can actually walk into.
Three districts, one clear intention
The overlay isn't a single blanket rule across downtown. It splits into three subareas, each with a distinct job:
| District | Location | Intended use |
|---|---|---|
| Innovation District | Palisades Boulevard to La Montana Drive | Labs, light manufacturing |
| Business District | South of Palisades Boulevard, between Saguaro Boulevard and La Montana Drive | Offices, professional services |
| Avenue District | Avenue of the Fountains and Verde River Drive to Parkview Avenue | Retail, dining, entertainment |
The Avenue District is the one that touches daily life most directly, and it's the one built around the fountain itself. The town also loosened density rules to support housing above those ground-floor shops, allowing up to 35 residential units per acre on an individual parcel in the Business and Avenue Districts, as long as the average across a full block doesn't exceed 15 units per acre. That detail matters more than it sounds. It means the town isn't just asking for more restaurants at street level, it's making it easier to put more people living above them, which is the combination that actually keeps a downtown occupied outside of festival weekends.
Development Services Director John Wesley put the intent plainly when the council approved the change, saying the vote lets the town's downtown strategy move forward in a meaningful way. That's not marketing language from a chamber pamphlet. It's a zoning official describing a specific tool the town built to change what shows up on the Avenue.
The evidence is already renting space
Two businesses opening within a few blocks of each other this year make the case better than any ordinance summary could.
Good Living Greens started as a home operation, two founders, Jill and Jeremy Keefe, growing microgreens for their own health and selling extras to neighbors. Demand grew into juices and whole-food meals, then into a small storefront. This year the business relocated to 16845 E. Avenue of the Fountains, nearly tripling its footprint from about 1,300 square feet to almost 3,000, and now partners with more than 30 local vendors. That's not a chain deciding Fountain Hills looks good on a map. That's a business that grew out of the neighborhood outgrowing its own space and choosing to stay on the Avenue to do it.
A few doors down, Snowbird Ice Cream Co. opens its doors Saturday, September 13, at 16725 E. Avenue of the Fountains. The founder is Izaak Wontorski, a 21-year-old Fountain Hills resident who says the idea traces back to postgame ice cream trips during his years playing hockey. The shop will serve small-batch flavors from Chocolate Shoppe in Madison, Wisconsin, built around ingredients like Madagascar vanilla and ultra-dark Zanzibar chocolate, and it's set to run Tuesday through Sunday from noon to 10 p.m., making it one of the few spots downtown open into the evening. A 21-year-old opening a storefront on the Avenue instead of running a stand at a farmers market is exactly the kind of small, ground-level bet the overlay district was written to encourage.
Neither business needed the zoning change to exist. What the zoning change does is make it more likely that the next vacancy on the Avenue becomes something like these two rather than another office suite with the blinds always drawn.
The calendar backs up the zoning story
If the Downtown Overlay District nudges the buildings toward retail, dining, and entertainment, the event calendar shows entertainment already leaning into that space just as hard.
- Fall Fountain Festival of Fine Arts & Crafts, November 13 through 15, free, spread across the Avenue of the Fountains and Saguaro Boulevard. The Fountain Hills Chamber of Commerce describes it as a 50-plus-year tradition that showcases more than 400 juried artists and consistently draws tens of thousands of visitors to downtown.
- Music Fest, a free evening of live music along the Avenue with food trucks and a beer and wine garden, part of the town's regular concert programming rather than a one-off.
- The 35th Annual Turkey Trot 5K, run and walk on Thanksgiving morning, circling the World Famous Fountain before the town's Thanksgiving Day parade. Registration opened July 1.
Earlier this year, the town also ran its first-ever Irish Fountain Fest, turning the fountain emerald green at noon and again at 4 p.m. on St. Patrick's Day, with food and live music filling the Avenue for an event that didn't exist on the calendar before 2026. New standing events don't get added to a downtown calendar by accident. They get added when a town believes people will actually show up and has the storefronts nearby to support them once they do.
None of this happens in isolation from the larger project underway a short distance from downtown. The International Dark Sky Discovery Center is under construction in Fountain Hills, with a target opening in early 2027. It sits outside the Downtown Overlay District itself, but it's one more sign that the town is building toward a version of Fountain Hills where downtown is a destination on its own terms, not just a drive-through on the way to the golf course.
What this actually means if you already live here
The honest version of this story isn't that Fountain Hills suddenly has more places to eat ice cream. It's that the town identified a specific problem, a downtown with too much office space and too little reason to walk it after 5 p.m., and wrote a zoning tool to fix it instead of just hoping tenants would show up on their own. Good Living Greens and Snowbird Ice Cream are the first visible proof the tool is working. The Fall Fountain Festival and the town's growing events lineup show the entertainment side of the district is filling in at the same pace as the retail side.
If you've lived near the Avenue for years and stopped paying attention to what's in the storefronts, this fall is worth a second look. The zoning change means the next few vacancies are likely to turn into something you'd actually walk into rather than another suite with frosted glass and a receptionist's desk.
At Hoyt Homes Group, we spend as much time tracking changes like this one as we do tracking listings, because a zoning shift that reshapes a downtown corridor eventually shows up in what a home nearby is worth. If you're curious what that means for your own property along the Avenue or anywhere else in Fountain Hills, Hoyt Homes Group can get you a straightforward answer. Get Your Instant Home Valuation any time you want to see where things stand.
