Five new businesses have secured full city approval to open at Fairlane Green, the sprawling Allen Park shopping center known locally as “the Hill,” with Shake Shack, Jersey Mike's, CAVA, honeygrow and El Car Wash all set to move into the retail center's newest expansion. Three buildings within the project are already under construction, though none of them have determined opening dates yet.
According to MLive, Shake Shack and Jersey Mike's will share one building, while CAVA and honeygrow are planned for another, and El Car Wash will occupy its own separate structure. The development, known as Fairlane Green III, sits at 3100 Fairlane Drive near the existing Target store and is being built out in phases by developer Alrig USA, which proposed developing the final 20 acres next to the existing power center. Allen Park Building and Economic Development Director Matt Baker told the outlet that infrastructure work remains incomplete and there is currently no timeframe for when the roads and access points will be finished.
Fairlane Green III includes seven retail buildings in total, and Baker said other buildings are part of the development even though their future tenants are not yet known. Several of the Phase III spaces offer drive-thru opportunities, according to the report, and more businesses could be added as the property continues to develop. Commercial leasing materials from Mid-America Real Estate show the expansion covers 20 acres adjacent to the existing 1.4 million-square-foot power center, with seven planned outlots serving a 1-mile daytime population of more than 18,000 people.
New Roads Will Tie the Expansion to the Rest of the Center
The plans call for two new access points serving Fairlane Green III, per the same MLive report — one along the Southfield Freeway service drive and another along Oakwood Boulevard. A new connecting drive will also link the Phase III development to the existing Target-anchored area of the shopping center, which sits near the intersection of Southfield Freeway, Outer Drive, I-94 and Oakwood Boulevard.
Fairlane Green's existing roughly 1.4 million square feet already houses major retailers including Target, Meijer, The Home Depot, Best Buy, Barnes & Noble, Five Below, TJ Maxx and LA Fitness, the report notes. The center's location near Ford Motor Company's Allen Park and Dearborn operations matters for the new tenants' business models: the corridor sits directly adjacent to Ford facilities employing nearly 25,000 workers in the surrounding area, according to Mid-America Real Estate leasing materials, giving the fast-casual newcomers a built-in daytime customer base.
A Landfill Turned Landmark Retail Site
The ground beneath the new construction has a notable history. Fairlane Green was built on the former 243-acre Ford Allen Park Clay Mine Landfill, an industrial waste site Ford used from the mid-1950s until 1996 to deposit non-putrescible waste from the nearby Ford Rouge Center, according to NTH Consultants. In December 2002, the Allen Park City Council unanimously designated the site as a brownfield and created a Brownfield Redevelopment Authority, a move that let Ford capture property tax increments over 30 years to offset up to $30 million in extraordinary cleanup and infrastructure costs.
That specialized engineering hasn't gone away just because the site is now a retail hub. Contractors installed more than 30,000 cubic yards of lightweight geo-foam blocks under foundations and built passive methane gas management systems using HDPE membranes across 500,000 square feet of space, according to Iafrate Construction. That kind of foundational work helps explain why Baker described the infrastructure timeline as still unsettled. When its initial phase opened in 2006, Fairlane Green became the first multi-tenant retail power center in the country to earn LEED Gold certification from the U.S. Green Building Council, later winning the National Phoenix Award for Excellence in Brownfield Development.
Familiar Names With Growing Michigan Footprints
El Car Wash, the Miami-based chain taking its own standalone building in Phase III, expanded into Michigan in 2024 as the official car wash of the Detroit Lions, and Pro Football Hall of Famer Barry Sanders purchased an ownership stake in the company in December 2024, per PR Newswire. CAVA, meanwhile, opened its first Metro Detroit location on Woodward Avenue in downtown Detroit in September 2025 as part of a national push toward 1,000 restaurants by 2032 — a milestone Hoodline previously covered when the chain first announced its downtown debut.
Philadelphia-based stir-fry chain honeygrow made its Michigan market debut in May 2026 with a location in Rochester Hills before signing on for its Downriver expansion at Fairlane Green, according to WhatNow Detroit. The Allen Park store marks one of the concept's first footholds in Wayne County.
The Hill's Long Shadow Over Downriver Retail
Fairlane Green's original 2005–2006 opening already reshaped Downriver's retail map once, pulling major national tenants away from older shopping centers, including the former Lincoln Park Shopping Center that had been anchored by Sears just a mile away — a shift Hoodline detailed in its report. Two decades later, the arrival of Shake Shack, Jersey Mike's, CAVA, honeygrow and El Car Wash suggests that gravitational pull toward the Hill hasn't slowed down, even as older neighboring centers continue searching for ways to fill the gaps it left behind.
