Ask anyone in Wedgwood or Ravenna this summer what happened to the old QFC site at 35th and 85th, and you'll get the same confident answer: the deal died in January, the developer walked, and the neighborhood is back to waiting. That version of the story made the rounds for good reason. It was true for about five months. It stopped being true in June.
If you live anywhere under the NE Seattle umbrella, whether that's Wedgwood, Ravenna, Bryant, or over toward Maple Leaf and Roosevelt, the 35th Avenue corridor is the spine most of your errands run along. So the gap between what people think is happening there and what's actually happening matters more than it would in a neighborhood you just drive through.
What Actually Happened to the Grocery Store
The collapse was real, and it was reported clearly. In January 2026, the property owner and developer reached an impasse over plans to put a mixed-use project on the site of a former QFC, after Security Properties said it couldn't find financing for a $200 million rebuild of Wedgwood Center that would've included upscale grocer Town & Country Markets. Sarah Zahn, the company's managing director of development, put it plainly at the time:
"Unfortunately, we have made the decision to step away from the purchase agreement in light of market conditions."
Wes Williams, whose family has owned the shopping center for decades, gave his own account of why the deal fell apart:
"We tried to make it work and Security just wanted to kick the can down the road a little more. So we said we weren't going to go any further."
Town & Country's CEO Ryan Ritter didn't sound like a company giving up on the neighborhood, though. He said in a statement that his company remained committed to bringing Town & Country Markets to the Wedgwood neighborhood and community, and that line turned out to matter more than it seemed to at the time.
Because by late June, the Wedgwood Community Council reported something that hadn't been public until then. The property owner had been in negotiations with a new developer for a few months, and that developer had formally introduced itself to the city by updating the contacts on the Master Use Permit and submitting an updated plan set, understood to be the Madison Development Group, described as a local build-to-hold developer. The zoning fight underneath all of this hasn't gone away either. Comprehensive plan updates that would upzone Wedgwood to five or six stories under the city's One Seattle Plan are still in the discussion phase, which is the same height debate that shaped the first deal.
So the honest current answer isn't "dead" or "back," it's "quietly restarted under different ownership, same zoning fight, same site." That's a meaningfully different thing to tell a neighbor than the January headline.
The Numbers Nobody Argued Over
Here's what got lost in the drama of the collapse: the site doesn't actually require a single 32,000-square-foot supermarket to bring grocery service back, and the last year of grocery openings around Seattle proves it.
| Site | Square footage | Status as of 2026 |
|---|---|---|
| Former QFC, Wedgwood Center | about 15,000 sq ft | vacant since 2021 |
| Former Rite Aid, across the intersection | about 25,000 sq ft | vacant since July 2025 |
| PCC Corner Market, Rainier Tower | 6,000 sq ft | opened summer 2025 |
PCC opened its first Corner Market at the base of the Rainier Tower in summer 2025 after closing a larger store it had previously operated at that location, and the new format runs 6,000 square feet. That's less than half the old QFC's footprint and a fraction of the six-story, 300-plus-unit building Security Properties had proposed. One resident comment on the Wedgwood Community Council site put the underlying frustration well: the community shouldn't be led to believe the only way to restore grocery service is a six-story building filled with small apartments atop a 32,000-square-foot store. Whether Madison Development Group scales the project down or not, the PCC example shows grocers are already comfortable building smaller in this city, which is worth knowing before anyone tells you the neighborhood is stuck without a market until a mega-project clears permitting. There's also a second grocery chain now in the picture that wasn't part of the original math: a Trader Joe's coming soon to Northgate, which could change the calculus of which chain wants to be part of whatever gets built at 35th and 85th.
None of this means the site's future is settled. It means the "nothing is happening" read on the corner was wrong twice this year, first when the deal quietly died and again when it quietly came back.
The Corridor Filled In Anyway
While the anchor site sat empty, the smaller storefronts around it didn't wait for a developer's timeline.
- Lovestruck in Seattle, a bookstore at 8507 35th Ave NE, opened in October 2025 in a building that was originally the office of Albert Balch, the developer who platted Wedgwood.
- Ravenna Refills, a plastic-free general store, opened January 29, 2025 and was named the Roosevelt Neighborhood Association's January 2026 Business of the Month for its B Corp-certified home and personal-care goods. It marked its first year with a swap event for clothing, puzzles, books, tarot, and plants, part of a regular series where neighbors trade items they no longer need.
- Mioposto, the Ravenna pizzeria at 3426 NE 55th Street, spent months closed after an SUV ran a red light at 35th and NE 55th and crashed into the restaurant on the evening of July 4, injuring several diners and forcing a temporary shutdown. It reopened on December 10, 2025, and the same restaurant group had a fifth Seattle location planned for Eastlake, a 2,200-square-foot space with a central pizza bar and a wraparound patio, slated to open in August 2025.
- Ravenna Brewing Company, at 5408 26th Ave NE, has been pouring since 2016 as a 100% family-owned 7-barrel craft brewery in the heart of the Ravenna and Bryant neighborhood. On Husky game days, don't expect a television inside. A staff answer to a Yelp question about watching football summed up the arrangement: there's typically a food truck out front, no TVs, but plenty of Dawgs energy.
And for anyone tracking the health of the 85th Street district specifically, the steakhouse anchor everyone worried about is fine. A local business journal noted in 2025 that steak-loving locals could take heart that Wedgwood Broiler showed no sign of an imminent closure, and the restaurant is still turning up in 2026 community council posts as the one thing every version of the redevelopment plan has had to work around, serving the same 1950s American-style plates in the same shopping center it's anchored for decades.
The Ravine Is Still the Neighborhood's Best-Kept Quiet Spot
If the retail corridor is where NE Seattle argues about its future, Cowen and Ravenna Parks are where it goes to stop thinking about it. The two parks form one contiguous green space, and together they hold 4.5 miles of trail across a 0.75-mile stretch of ravine that drops as deep as 115 feet. Cowen Park alone covers 8.4 acres, and the crossing at 20th Avenue NE, known locally as the Ravenna Park Bridge, has been closed to motorized traffic since 1975, which is part of why it still feels like a walking-and-running route rather than a road.
The western end has a zipline and ballfield, the eastern end has a sandbox, and the half mile in between runs alongside Ravenna Creek the whole way. It's the kind of urban trail where you're never more than a few blocks from your own street, which is exactly what makes it useful on a weekday evening when a full hike isn't realistic but sitting inside isn't appealing either.
What This Means for the Rest of the Summer
The Wedgwood Community Council has been holding regular Zoom board meetings through the summer to keep neighbors current on both the redevelopment and the broader One Seattle Plan zoning discussion, so residents with an opinion on building heights along 35th still have a way to weigh in rather than find out after the fact. The grocery site's status will likely keep changing in increments rather than headlines, which means the neighbors who actually know what's going on will be the ones checking in periodically rather than the ones who read one article back in January and stopped there.
That's really the throughline here. The corner everyone assumed was frozen has had two different owners of the conversation in six months, and the storefronts around it kept moving the whole time regardless of what happened at the anchor site. Paying attention to a neighborhood's daily rhythm, not just its biggest headline, tends to tell you more about where it's actually heading.
If you're weighing what a home in Wedgwood, Ravenna, or elsewhere in NE Seattle is really worth given how this corridor is evolving, that's a conversation grounded in specifics like these, not a generic market summary. Stanford Group tracks this kind of neighborhood-level detail because it's what actually shapes value here. Reach out for a personalized market and renovation consultation whenever you're ready to talk specifics.
