Downtown Roseburg New Businesses in 2026: What’s Lasting
August 13, 2026
August 13, 2026
Before the ribbon was even cut, kids were already climbing on it. The new play equipment going into Brown Park drew a crowd of children who couldn't wait for the official opening, sliding and running through the expansion while the paperwork was still being finished. It's a small scene, but it says something about where Roseburg's attention has been this year: watching things get built back.
If you've lived here through the last couple of years, you've noticed the pattern. Big Lots closed. Joann Fabrics closed. Rite Aid closed. The old Clubhouse by Round Table Pizza on Stewart Parkway shut its doors in July 2025, and headlines lumped it in with the rest of that exodus. Empty storefronts became something Roseburg residents got used to walking past.
But 2026 has been the year those storefronts started filling back in, and the two places that's happening, the Roseburg Marketplace strip and downtown proper, tell almost opposite stories about what "new business" actually means.
Drive to the intersection of Northwest Garden Valley Boulevard and Northwest Stewart Parkway and you'll find the most visible sign of Roseburg's retail turnover. The old Round Table Pizza space didn't stay empty long. A Wingstop moved into a portion of the old dining room, with corporate communications associate manager Lauren Gracey telling KQEN News Radio by email that the location was tracking to open in late June or early July. Wingstop isn't a small operator testing a new market. The chain now runs over 3,000 locations and added nearly 500 new stores in 2025 alone, so a Roseburg opening is one node in an expansion happening in hundreds of towns at once.
Round Table Pizza itself came back too, in the same building, under the same ownership as the Wingstop next door. The pizza chain soft-opened on July 2 and posted its official "Now Open" signs by July 6, closing a loop that started in January when photos of new signage first circulated on Facebook. The comeback drew mixed reactions locally. One resident told The News-Review she was glad for another pizza option in town, while another, whose family owns a pizza restaurant nearby, worried the return of a national chain would pull business away from smaller, independent shops already competing for the same customers.
A few blocks over, the vacant Big Lots space on Stephens Street is becoming a Tractor Supply Company, with a soft opening that landed in mid-March. That single storefront is part of something much bigger than Roseburg's local economy. Eighteen former Big Lots locations across the country are being converted into Tractor Supply stores, and in Oregon alone the chain plans to grow from 11 stores to 20 by the end of 2026, with new builds landing simultaneously in Lebanon, North Bend, McMinnville, Redmond, Hillsboro, Bend, Hermiston, and Medford. Roseburg's new Tractor Supply isn't really a decision about Roseburg. It's one square on a spreadsheet that also includes eight other Oregon towns.
None of this is bad news for a resident who just wants more places to eat or shop. But it's worth being clear-eyed about what it is: national chains rotating through the same handful of big-box and strip-mall footprints, following real estate logic that has nothing to do with anything specific to this town.
Downtown tells a different story, and it's one that took longer to show up because it depended on people willing to commit years, not quarters.
The clearest example is the Majestic Theater and Big Picture Cafe, planned for 431 SE Main St. Owner Sharon Lee Schwartz has been working on the project for four years, reviving a name last used by a Roseburg movie house that opened in 1913 and closed in 1928. The new version is a single-screen independent theater built to hold about 40 people, paired with a café serving concessions alongside food with international flavors. Schwartz told The News-Review the project was aimed at filling a gap the town didn't have filled elsewhere:
"We would really like to bring this to the community and offer something that's not already here."
That's not the kind of sentence a franchise real estate team writes about a Tractor Supply conversion. It's the sentence of someone who spent four years deciding a 40-seat theater was worth building in a specific town, for specific neighbors.
The other big downtown move came from a government, not a chain. The Cow Creek Band of Umpqua Tribe of Indians purchased the long-vacant Rite Aid and Safeway properties downtown, with renovation funding drawn from Oregon's Main Street program and Umpqua Health Alliance, according to a January 2026 guest column from Ford Family Foundation's Max Gimbel. That's the same Rite Aid brand that showed up on the highway corridor's list of departures. Downtown, its empty shell isn't waiting for the next national tenant. It's being renovated with preservation-minded grant dollars by a tribal government with a long-term stake in the town.
The same column pointed to a handful of smaller but connected changes:
Individually, none of these is a headline. Together, they describe a downtown that's being reinvested in by people and institutions with a reason to stick around, not just a lease to fill.
It would be easy to read every "new business" story this year as evidence of the same thing: Roseburg is growing, storefronts are filling, good news all around. That's true, but it flattens a distinction that actually matters if you're paying attention to your own town.
The Roseburg Marketplace corner shows how fast national retail can move. A pizza chain can close, get replaced by another concept from the same franchisee, and reopen within a year. A Tractor Supply can appear because a corporate real estate team decided a former Big Lots footprint fit its 2026 growth math. That kind of change is real, and it's convenient, but it's also portable. The same decisions are happening in eight other Oregon towns this year for the same reasons.
Downtown's changes move slower because they depend on someone with local knowledge choosing to bet on this specific place. A four-year theater build. A tribal government buying a vacant grocery store instead of leaving it dark. A farmers market relocation that was planned to bring foot traffic to a particular stretch of sidewalk. Those decisions are harder to replicate and harder to reverse, which is usually a sign they're built to last past the next lease cycle.
If you already live here, the practical takeaway is simple: watch downtown, not the highway strip, for the changes that tend to stick. The Majestic Theater's original timeline pointed to a spring opening, though no further update has confirmed whether that date held by late summer. The Rite Aid and Safeway renovations don't yet have a public completion date either. Those are the projects worth checking on again in a few months, because they're the ones telling you something true about where Roseburg is headed, not just which chain happened to need a new location this year.
If any of this has you thinking about what it means for your own home, whether Douglas County's shifting downtown changes what your property is worth or what you'd want in your next one, Umpqua Valley Homes is a good place to start that conversation. Request a home valuation or schedule a consultation with Gina Evenich or Randy Grimes whenever you're ready.
From first-time buyers to seasoned investors, we treat every client’s goal as our own. We pride ourselves on strong communication and a detail-oriented approach that protects your interests at every turn. Reach out to us for a supportive, professional real estate experience.
