Ask a longtime Hideout resident where they buy milk and the answer is the same no matter which street they live on: Kamas, or Park City, whichever direction the rest of the errands happen to be pointing that day. The town has never had a grocery store. It has never had a gas station. Its closest restaurant sits just outside town limits at Black Rock Mountain Resort. That has been the case since Hideout incorporated in 2008, and it was still the case last August, when a family who had just bought a home here told the Hideout Planning Commission that they had spent months driving up and down State Route 248 without being able to buy so much as a bottle of water.
That kind of comment usually reads as a complaint about a town that talks about commercial development and never builds it. Hideout has done plenty of talking. What changed over the last nine months is that two different developers, with two very different track records, now both have signed agreements in hand and a 2026 target on the calendar.
Every Version of This Promise Before This One
The town has been here before, more than once. In September 2023, Hideout issued a request for information on a town-owned parcel near the Jordanelle State Park entrance called Ross Creek, with a stated vision of cafes, pubs, and a plaza where residents could gather. A year later, in November 2024, the town held an open house where residents placed red dot stickers on renderings to vote for their preferred version of a Ross Creek neighborhood center. Nearly a year after that, reporting on the project in September 2025 noted there was still no set timeline for building anything on the site.
Ross Creek isn't dead, but it also hasn't moved much past where it stood in 2023. That gap between an open house and an actual groundbreaking is why residents have learned to treat "commercial coming to Hideout" as background noise rather than news worth acting on.
What Actually Moved in November and December
Two things happened at the end of last year that broke from that pattern.
On November 13, the Hideout Town Council approved a master development agreement for a project called Wildhorse, proposed by developer Tim Schoen on 15 acres at the town's north end, across SR-248 from the Shoreline neighborhood and just north of the Klaim subdivision. The plan splits into three pieces: seven single-family lots called Wildhorse Estates, five more called Wildhorse Villas, and tucked between them, Wildhorse Village, a two-story commercial building holding a restaurant and bar, an artisan cafe, and a specialty grocer. Schoen has said he wants the project to feel like a gathering spot, telling town officials, "We're elevating everyday living in Hideout." Planning Commission notes from earlier in the process even reference discussion of whether the internal access road should eventually connect all the way from SR-248 to Golden Eagle on the east shore, though the final alignment hasn't been settled.
A month later, in a special December newsletter, the town announced a second and considerably larger project. Larry H. Miller Real Estate, the company behind Salt Lake City's Downtown Daybreak district and the Power District development, owns 350 acres in an area of Hideout it calls Silver Meadows, land the town gained through its Richardson Flat annexation near the US-40 and SR-248 interchange. The plan calls for a grocery store, retail space, dining, a possible new school site, and trail connections into the Jordanelle hillside. A master development agreement is already in place, and phase one is expected to break ground sometime in 2026.
Laid side by side, the three projects look like this:
- Wildhorse (north end of town, 15 acres): restaurant, bar, artisan cafe, and specialty grocer, plus 12 home lots. Master agreement approved November 2025, with infrastructure construction next.
- Silver Meadows (Richardson Flat, 350 acres): grocery store, retail, dining, and a possible school site, developed by Larry H. Miller Real Estate. Master agreement signed, phase one groundbreaking expected in 2026.
- Ross Creek (Jordanelle State Park entrance, roughly a dozen acres): originally floated for cafes and a plaza. Still without a construction timeline as of the most recent reporting.
A Developer Hideout Hasn't Worked With Before
The distinction between Silver Meadows and everything that came before it isn't just size. It's who's building it. Larry H. Miller Real Estate broke ground on Phase 1 of Downtown Daybreak in South Jordan in October 2023, and two years later, in October 2025, broke ground again on a 10-story, 300,000-square-foot corporate campus for Rocky Mountain Power at the Power District. This is the same ownership group behind Real Salt Lake, the Utah Royals FC, and the Salt Lake Bees. A company that moves projects from announcement to shovels at that pace operates on a different clock than a town that spent two years running an RFI on a 10-acre parking lot.
Brad Holmes, president of Larry H. Miller Real Estate, has said the project "brings incredible benefit to the residents of Hideout." Mayor Ralph Severini, in the same December announcement, said the development "will help bring critical amenities including a grocery store, dining options and retail" much closer to town.
The Skeptics Have a Point Too
Not every voice on the Planning Commission has been convinced that a restaurant on a hillside in Hideout is a sure thing. Commissioner Rachel Cooper raised doubts at the August 2025 meeting where Wildhorse's agreement first came up for a vote, questioning the site's viability and pointing to a cautionary example nearby.
"Everyone I know went the first time to check it out, and now nobody goes."
She was talking about the restaurant at Black Rock Ridge. Commissioner Joel Pieper added that the Wildhorse proposal would require numerous exceptions to town code to move forward at all. Both concerns made it into the public record before the council approved the agreement anyway. It's a useful reminder that a signed development agreement is a real step forward, not a guarantee that every seat gets filled once the doors open.
Why the Town Needs This As Much As Residents Do
Part of what's pushing Hideout to move faster than it has in nearly two decades is money. The town has been organizing a community reinvestment agency to use tax increment financing on the Richardson Flat land, and one town-commissioned estimate found that developing 120 of the parcel's 350 acres, at roughly $3 million in building value per acre, could generate a little north of $300 million in new taxable value and around $250,000 in new property tax and entity revenue each year. In his February 2026 State of the Town address, Severini pointed to Silver Meadows and Wildhorse directly as paths toward what he called financial independence for a town currently running on a $2.2 million budget.
What a Tuesday Morning Actually Looks Like Once This Opens
For residents, the practical shift is smaller than the budget math but more immediate. Schoen has described wanting people to grab morning coffee on a deck overlooking the reservoir before work, and come back in the evening for a drink with the same view. A specialty grocer at Wildhorse and a full grocery store at Silver Meadows would mean the Kamas or Park City run becomes optional for the first time since the town existed, not a weekly requirement built around whatever else is on the calendar.
None of this is finished. Wildhorse still has infrastructure construction ahead of it before the village itself gets built. Silver Meadows has a phase-one groundbreaking targeted for sometime this year, with details still being finalized. But for a town where "commercial development" has mostly meant renderings and red dot stickers, having two separate agreements signed and dated within a month of each other is the closest thing Hideout has had to forward motion in nearly two decades.
The east shore has already been part of these conversations, whether residents realized it or not. At that same August 2025 meeting where Commissioner Cooper raised her doubts, a Golden Eagle property owner named Carla Mathiason spoke in support of restricting nightly rentals in the new development, one more voice in a town hall room working out what its own future looks like.
If you're already watching this unfold from a lot on the east shore, or thinking about what a shorter grocery run might mean for how often you actually use your place here, the team at Golden Eagle is easy to find. Schedule a personal tour and we'll walk you through what's coming, not just what's already built.
