➤ Key Highlights
Midway, 3Edgewood, and Parkway are launching Phase 2 at Central Park Post Oak.
The phase adds 30K sf of new and integrated retail.
Campus retail crosses 150K sf total.
Élephante (11K sf) and Bar Bambino (2K sf) anchor as chef-driven F&B.
Elsewhere in metro Houston, Funbox leased 20K sf at Northland Shopping Center.
➤ SIGNAL
Retail’s recovery is being led by food, beverage, and experience — not goods.
Mixed-use campuses are leasing retail into office, not separating it.
The Sun Belt’s leasing momentum extends past housing into ground-floor retail.
While national headlines fixate on office distress, the ground floor of the right mixed-use asset is leasing. Central Park Post Oak — an office complex — is deepening its retail program because the live-work-play format still draws tenants when the location and the daytime population are there. Experiential and F&B concepts are taking the space that apparel and big-box once held.
The mix matters: chef-driven restaurants and entertainment (Funbox) are signing, not commodity retail. That’s the post-2020 retail thesis in practice — square footage flows to uses that can’t be bought online.
Grocery-anchored and experiential remain the two retail safe-harbors, but this is the experiential leg: well-located mixed-use with daytime traffic still commands leasing demand. For owners, the conversion play is amenitizing office with F&B — turning a vacancy problem into a retention tool.
➤ TAKEAWAY
Retail isn’t dying — it’s migrating to the uses a screen can’t replace. For owners, that reframes the vacancy problem: the empty box isn’t a retail failure, it’s a programming opportunity — chef-driven F&B and entertainment underwrite the foot traffic that apparel and big-box no longer can. The defensible square footage now is whatever pulls a daytime population through the door, and in well-located mixed-use that’s a retention tool for the office above it, not just a line on the rent roll.
Source: CBisnow Houston Deal Sheet, Midway — June 12, 2026
