Can a town this size support a fully leased mall and a thriving Main Street at the same time? Yankton is currently running that experiment, whether anyone planned it that way or not, and the early evidence points somewhere more interesting than either a mall story or a downtown story on its own.
For most of the last decade, the answer to that question looked settled. A ring of national retailers sat nineteen blocks north of the Missouri River, and the six-block stretch of shops that parallel the riverbank looked headed toward becoming, as longtime shop owner Cathy Clatworthy put it, little more than a scattering of bars and antique stores. Then the order reversed. The mall went dark for the better part of ten to fifteen years. The riverfront kept filling in with small, stubborn businesses. And now, in the same stretch of months, both are showing signs of life again, for reasons that have almost nothing to do with each other.
The Six Blocks Everyone Already Calls "the Strip"
Nobody at city hall named this district. Clatworthy remembers overhearing a customer on the phone in her home décor shop, laughing to a friend, "We're doing The Strip!" The name stuck because it describes something real: a six-block run of storefronts paralleling the river on the south edge of the old city, anchored architecturally around the corner of Third and Walnut, where the entire commercial district carries a National Register of Historic Places designation covering twenty separate structures.
Walk it today and you'll pass Rita Houska's shop, where she started selling jewelry and purses out of the back of her father's antique store in 2007 and opened her own storefront a year later. She and her daughter Mandi now run two full floors of a historic building, including a basement with a ceiling just six feet six inches high, still packed with the kind of one-of-a-kind inventory that doesn't survive a big-box competitor moving in next door. A few doors down, Carla Mueller runs Ninth Street Clothing, a business she started on the edge of town in 2017 and moved downtown in 2023 into a building she and her husband built themselves, near Riverside Field at Bob Tereshinski Stadium. Five years ago she and her husband also bought a home décor shop called Monta's and renamed it Forte. Drew Delvaux and Zeke Matthews took a similar path in reverse, starting an online furniture restoration business in 2017 before opening a brick-and-mortar location, River City Relics, stocked with home décor, art, and clothing. Muddy Mo's, a coffee shop named for the river a block away, is one of the newest additions to the block.
None of this reads like a district that was supposed to survive the last twenty years of retail history.
What "Empty" Used to Mean Here
To understand why the current moment matters, it helps to remember what downtown looked like when the mall was still the center of gravity. A decade ago, Yankton Mall held JC Penney, K-Mart, and the other national names that pulled shoppers north. Clatworthy recalls trying to rent display space inside the mall to invite those same shoppers downtown after they finished browsing, only to be turned down by the mall's out-of-state owner, Dial Enterprises of Omaha. The two retail districts weren't complementary. They were competing for the same foot traffic, and downtown was losing.
That dynamic isn't unique to Yankton. The United States had roughly 25,000 enclosed malls in the 1980s. Today there are about 1,000, and Capital One Research projects that figure could fall to 150 by 2032. Set against that national contraction, a small-city mall clawing its way back to full occupancy in 2025 and 2026 is the unusual outcome, not the expected one.
The Mall's Comeback Runs on a Different Engine
When local entrepreneur Matt Evans bought the mall in 2023 from Dial Enterprises, the only tenant left standing was Dunham's Sports, inside a building topping 250,000 square feet. Evans reopened the movie theater almost immediately, a move that had been closed since the pandemic and drew what local coverage described as genuine applause from residents. From there, he set about filling roughly 100,000 square feet with three national anchors: Hobby Lobby, taking over the old fountain area at 60,000 square feet with an exterior-only entrance, Marshalls at the opposite end, and Five Below between them. All three signed ten-year leases. Five Below opened first, Hobby Lobby followed on August 22, 2025, and Marshalls opened in the weeks after, timed close enough to that year's Riverboat Days that the mall offered parking and trolley rides to the festival.
The city commission voted twice to grant Evans a sales tax rebate, which helped fund a full repaving of a parking lot that had been notoriously potholed for years. That's the mechanism worth noticing: this isn't organic retail demand pulling tenants back on its own. It's a municipal subsidy paired with a private buyer willing to gut and re-lease a quarter-million square feet, aimed specifically at capturing anchor tenants who want to be near other anchor tenants. Evans has said he expects three to four more tenant announcements, and that the building is filling faster than he originally projected.
The Housing Money Tells a Different Story
Here's where the split gets interesting. If national retailers are placing their bet on the mall side of town, the people building housing are placing theirs somewhere else entirely.
Gurney Flats, a four-story, 104-unit apartment complex, has opened directly on the riverbank, inside walking distance of the Strip. Meanwhile, in east Yankton, River City Flats broke ground as an 81-unit project spread across three buildings, backed by 68 local investors who each put in a minimum of $15,000. Board chair Rob Stephenson noted that even though 210 housing units had come onto the Yankton market in the previous seventeen months, all of them filled up almost immediately. Separately, construction began in May on a seven-story loft that will be tall enough to change the town's skyline, something Yankton hasn't seen in living memory.
None of that construction is happening near the mall. It's happening near the river, in the same corridor where small retail has spent a decade proving it could survive without an anchor tenant to lean on. If you're trying to read where actual demand for living space is landing in this town, the apartment cranes are a more honest signal than the retail leases.
What's Actually New If You Want to Walk It This Month
For anyone who wants to see the current state of things firsthand, here's what's changed most recently along the Strip and nearby:
- Muddy Mo's coffee shop, the newest addition to the block, named after the river itself
- River City Relics, Drew Delvaux and Zeke Matthews's home décor and furniture shop
- The splash pad at the foot of the historic Meridian Bridge, a draw for families in warm months
- The Black Steer, one of South Dakota's oldest steakhouses, still serving the same filets and ribs it always has
- Gurney Flats, the new riverbank apartment complex, now open
The Slow Project Holding It Together
One thread ties the mall's revival, the Strip's resilience, and the current construction boom together, and it isn't retail or apartments at all. It's Onward Yankton, the local nonprofit that organized a community brainstorming session back in 2017, bringing in the state's architectural community and Dakota Resources staff to meet with more than a hundred Yankton residents about what downtown should become. That session produced the goals people are still working through today: more downtown apartments, sharper historic preservation, better public gathering space, more shopping.
Onward Yankton also took over the loan on the Dakota Theatre, the 1902 performing arts building on Walnut Street known for its yellow 1940s Art Deco facade. After stabilizing the roof and brick exterior, the group kicked off a three-year, $2 million capital campaign aimed at fully restoring the building, including its ceiling, seating, plumbing, and stage systems, work that would eventually let the theater host traveling productions it currently can't accommodate. The facade restoration itself wrapped up last year. The rest of the campaign is still running.
That's the throughline. The same organization that got residents talking about downtown apartments in 2017 is now maintaining the one civic asset that neither a national retailer nor an apartment developer has any reason to touch. It's the slowest project of the three, and arguably the one most worth watching, because it's the only piece of this that isn't following a market signal. It's following a decade-old plan that the rest of the town is only now catching up to.
Yankton isn't choosing between the mall and the Strip. It's running both experiments in parallel, and the apartment buildings going up along the river suggest which one the town is actually betting on for its future.
If you're watching how a place like this changes over time, whether you live here already or you're weighing what a neighborhood's direction actually means for property values down the line, CORE Real Estate keeps a close eye on exactly this kind of shift across the Sioux Empire. Contact us if you want a read on what it means for where you live.
