Gunn Highway Is Becoming Two Different Streets, and Neither One Is Where Odessa Actually Meets
August 20, 2026
August 20, 2026
Drive Gunn Highway from the Citrus Park line up toward State Road 54 on any given Saturday and you will pass through what feels like two different towns wearing the same street sign. The southern stretch still looks like the Odessa that has been there for two decades: low strip centers, a scattering of food trucks, a growler bar that used to be a growler bar. Cross into the last mile before SR-54 and the pavement gets newer, the parking lots get bigger, and the signage starts to look like it was designed in a boardroom instead of a garage.
That split is not an illusion. It is the actual shape of what has opened, closed, and broken ground here since the fall of 2024, and it tells you something the growth headlines miss: Odessa is not becoming one bigger version of itself. It is becoming two separate commercial zones on the same road, serving two different reasons people leave their house.
The intersection of Gunn Highway and SR-54, directly across from Starkey Ranch, has spent the last two years filling in with the kind of tenants that show up when a master-planned community hits critical mass. Chick-fil-A opened its doors here on October 4, 2025, with owner-operator Josh Ragsdale running a location that brought roughly 100 new jobs to the corner. Lowe's got there first, opening on November 1, 2024, at 2317 Gunn Highway with a staff of more than 150. A few doors down, Keke's Breakfast Cafe held its grand opening across November 14 and 16 of that same year at 2310 Gunn Highway, putting a breakfast option directly across from the neighborhood it now feeds on weekend mornings.
Two more names have been announced for the same intersection, next to the Starkey Ranch Publix: Texas Roadhouse and Bubba's 33. Neither has a confirmed opening date yet, but both are far enough along to be listed as coming attractions rather than rumors.
Keep driving north on SR-54 toward Little Road and the pattern repeats at a larger scale. On February 13, 2026, formal construction plans were submitted to Pasco County for a development called the Marketplace at Trinity, anchored by a BJ's Wholesale Club with its own fuel station and a Home Depot with a garden center. Site plans for the same project have shown an Olive Garden and a LongHorn Steakhouse for some time, but as of that February filing, those two buildings had not yet had formal permits submitted. What has been filed is real. What is still on a rendering is not, and the difference matters if you are trying to picture this corridor a year from now instead of five.
A short list of what that means for someone driving this stretch today:
None of this is small. But all of it is aimed at the same customer: a family in a new build in Starkey Ranch who wants a national name they already trust, five minutes from their driveway.
Head the other direction on Gunn Highway, past the older subdivisions and back toward the Citrus Park line, and the story is not about chains filling in gaps. It is about small operators taking over spaces that never interested a corporate real estate team in the first place.
Gulf Pine Brewing opened at 8729 Gunn Highway in the same storefront that used to house Brū Florida Growler Bar. The LLC behind it was formed on January 13, 2025, roughly a year before the taproom actually started pouring, which tells you the founders spent that time building rather than announcing. What they built is deliberately small: a 30-gallon batch system, a fraction of the roughly 100-gallon output a standard 3.5-barrel setup produces. That is not a growth constraint. It is the point. A tighter batch size lets the taps change constantly instead of settling into a fixed lineup, and it explains why a brewery this new is already showing up in local trivia nights and chili cook-off chatter instead of on a distribution map. The taproom keeps a compact schedule to match: Thursday 5 to 10, Friday 3 to 10, Saturday noon to 10, Sunday 1 to 7, closed Monday and Tuesday.
A few blocks away, Philly Phlava has been running a cheesesteak food truck out of 2045 Gunn Highway for years, open from 11:30 in the morning until 3 in the afternoon, unbothered by whatever gets announced up the road. It is the kind of business that does not show up in a groundbreaking press release and does not need to.
Put those two ends of Gunn Highway side by side and the picture sharpens. The north end is answering a housing question: thousands of new rooftops in Starkey Ranch need groceries, hardware, and a Friday dinner option that does not require a reservation. The south end is answering a different question entirely, the one about where you go when you already know the area and want something that is not on every other Gunn Highway in Florida.
Neither end of that street has touched where Odessa residents actually run into each other.
Starkey Ranch Town Square has kept its Friday night food truck gathering running through every one of these openings, with a rotating truck lineup, live acoustic music, and lawn games that turn the square into the closest thing this community has to a standing weekly plan. It was happening before Chick-fil-A broke ground and it is happening now, unchanged by any of it.
The same holds for the market that sets up at the back of Starkey Ranch District Park near the soccer fields, where local vendors sell to shoppers and their dogs on a recurring schedule, and for the Community Market at Starkey Park, which runs monthly on the fourth Sunday from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. On select evenings, the park's sunset concert series pulls out blankets and coolers along the lake for an hour that has nothing to do with anything being built on SR-54.
Even the recreation habits that predate all of this construction have not budged. Van Dyke Farms Tennis Center, tucked into the Odessa countryside with eight courts, still draws players from as far as Westchase and Lutz who come for the same reason people always have: a quieter setting a few minutes off the main roads.
That is the actual story of Gunn Highway right now. It is not one neighborhood getting bigger. It is two separate commercial identities forming on the same three-mile stretch, chain retail consolidating at the Starkey Ranch end and independent operators filling the gaps toward Citrus Park, while the places where residents actually gather on a Friday night have not shifted an inch toward either one. If you already live here, that is probably the most useful thing to know before the next groundbreaking sign goes up: watch the construction if you want, but don't expect it to move where you end up on Saturday.
If you are curious how any of this new development along Gunn Highway or SR-54 is shaping home values in Starkey Ranch, Keystone, or the rest of Odessa, our Odessa neighborhood guide has the local context. Russell Adams Realty has been reading this stretch of Pasco County since long before any of these ribbon cuttings, and we are always glad to talk through what it actually means for the block you live on.
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