What's New in Brookhaven in 2026? Changes to Watch

Ask someone who has lived in Brookhaven for a few years what's new, and they'll usually point toward Dresden Drive: the restaurant row, Town Brookhaven, the corner where everyone already knows where to park. That answer isn't wrong, exactly. It's just increasingly incomplete.

The real activity this year is happening at the seams of the city, not its middle. A pedestrian bridge over Interstate 85 just cleared a major funding hurdle. Two new restaurants picked the same overlooked stretch of Clairmont Road within months of each other. And the Saturday market that's been running since before most of this was newsworthy just kept doing exactly what it does. None of these things made a single headline outside Brookhaven's own city hall page and a handful of local food blogs. Together, they say something about where this place is putting its money and its foot traffic that the Dresden Drive answer misses entirely.

The Bridge Nobody In The Village Will Use And Half The City Needs

On July 23, 2026, the Decide DeKalb Development Authority approved a $588,168 Urban Renewal Fund grant to advance design work on a pedestrian and bicycle bridge over I-85, connecting Emory University's Executive Park to the Peachtree Creek Greenway. The grant comes through the Briarcliff North Druid Hills Tax Allocation District and follows a much larger commitment: $15.8 million from Emory University over ten years, part of an agreement the city reached with DeKalb County and Emory earlier this year.

The bridge itself is described as a 14-foot-wide, grade-separated multiuse connection, built specifically to give pedestrians and cyclists a dedicated route above one of the region's busiest interstate corridors. Once it links up with the Greenway, it ties into PATH400, the Beltline's Northeast Trail, and DeKalb County's broader trail network on the other side.

What makes this worth paying attention to, beyond the recreational upside, is who it's for. Residents along the Buford Highway corridor sit close enough to Executive Park's jobs and the Children's Healthcare campus that a direct crossing changes their commute, but an interstate with no safe pedestrian route currently stands in the way. This bridge is aimed at fixing that specific gap, not adding another scenic loop for weekend cyclists. The financing structure matters here too: the city has been explicit that no residential property taxes will fund the design or construction, which is worth knowing if you've ever wondered how these projects actually get paid for.

None of this means shovels are in the ground. Design work is expected to wrap in 2027, and the city plans to return to the Decide DeKalb board in late 2027 requesting a supplemental award of roughly $5.35 million for construction costs. Right-of-way acquisition and environmental permitting still need to happen first. This is a bridge that just found its financial footing, not one that's opening this fall. If you've heard about it secondhand and assumed it was closer to done, it isn't, but it's real, funded, and moving.

Why Clairmont Road Is Where The New Restaurants Are Landing

While that infrastructure story plays out slowly, the food scene is moving faster, and it's choosing a different corridor than you'd expect.

In February, Richard Gazaway and Michael Colombo, who met years ago working together at Vintage Pizzeria, opened Unkie's Pizza and Bar at 3400 Clairmont Road, Suite A, in the space that used to be The Greek Pizzeria & Gyros. Gazaway grew up in nearby Chamblee and had been considering his next move since stepping away from his general manager role at Vintage Pizzeria in April 2025. When the two found the Clairmont spot, it felt like the right fit for staying close to the neighborhood they already knew.

"We wanted to stay within our community, whatever we did. That was part of what I loved about Vintage, being able to serve my neighbors and meeting people."

The first phase of Unkie's opened with the pizza operation running while the team built out a full bar and revamped the patio. A second phase, including that full bar and an expanded menu of sandwiches and appetizers, was slated for spring.

A few months later, on July 25, 2026, Beyond Juicery + Eatery opened its third Georgia location in Brookhaven. It's a smoothie and fresh-food chain, run locally by franchise partners Ricky Burch and Ross Hare, and it's part of a broader push by the brand into the metro Atlanta market.

Two unrelated businesses, choosing the same underdeveloped stretch of road within five months of each other, is not really a coincidence. Clairmont Road has spent years in Dresden Drive's shadow: less foot traffic, older retail bones, but also lower turnover costs and a customer base that's arguably underserved compared to the concentration of options a half mile away. When two independent operators land there back to back, that's a signal the corridor's economics have shifted enough to notice, even if nobody's written a trend piece about it yet.

The Rest Of The Plate

Clairmont isn't the only place absorbing new investment. A few other additions round out the picture:

• C&S Seafood and Oyster Bar opened its third metro Atlanta location in Brookhaven, joining locations in Milton and Johns Creek and bringing chargrilled oysters and lobster cobb salad to the local rotation.
• El Valle, a Mexican restaurant known for a Latin-forward wine list, is planning a second Brookhaven location this fall, according to a recent roundup of Atlanta's most anticipated fall openings.
• Beyond Juicery + Eatery rounds out the group as the newest arrival, open daily except Sunday mornings, when it opens two hours later than the rest of the week.

None of these are Village-core additions. They're spreading out, filling in corridors that used to be pass-through streets rather than destinations.

The Saturday That Hasn't Changed

Against all of that motion, one thing in Brookhaven has stayed exactly the same, and that consistency is doing real work.

The Brookhaven Farmers Market runs every Saturday morning from 9 a.m. to noon, rain or shine, in the parking lot of University Baptist Church off Dresden Drive. The 2026 season runs from March 28 through October 31, and it's now in its 16th year. It's a producer-only market, meaning the people selling you tomatoes or eggs are the ones who grew or raised them, and it draws a crowd that treats it less like a shopping errand and more like a standing weekly appointment.

In a year full of ribbon cuttings and funding announcements, the market's job is simpler: it's the fixed point everything else gets measured against. New restaurants come and go, bridges take years to fund and build, but the Saturday market has outlasted most of the businesses currently opening around it.

A Timeline, If You Want The Receipts

What This Means If You Already Live Here

If you've been tracking Brookhaven through Dresden Drive alone, you've been watching the wrong street. The bigger story this year is happening at the city's literal edges: the I-85 crossing that will eventually stitch the Buford Highway corridor to Executive Park's jobs, and the Clairmont Road stretch quietly picking up the kind of independent restaurant investment that used to skip past it.

None of this changes what Brookhaven is. It changes where the next few years of foot traffic, dinner reservations, and morning commutes are likely to land. If you're the kind of resident who notices when a corner changes hands, Clairmont Road and the north end of the Greenway are worth checking back on before the rest of the city catches up.

If you're weighing what any of this means for your own street, whether it's an early signal worth understanding or just good dinner conversation, Neil Hediger Real Estate knows this market closely enough to talk through it. Discover your home's curated potential. Let's talk.