In August 2025, Grimes told the state it had already passed 19,000 residents. City leaders were confident enough in that number to launch a special census to prove it, going door to door across the city's newest subdivisions to count heads and collect the federal and state funding that comes with population growth. When the results came back in spring 2026, the city had grown, just not to where its own estimate said it would land. The final count was 17,809.
That gap between what Grimes expected and what the census confirmed is not a rounding error. It's a window into how this city actually works. Grimes isn't building homes because families want them, though plenty do. It's building homes because population is the raw material every retailer, restaurant chain, and hotel brand checks before deciding whether to open a location here. Understand that mechanism and a lot of what looks confusing about new construction in Grimes, mixed housing types stacked next to each other, apartments appearing beside single-family plats, starts to make sense.
The Threshold Nobody Puts on a Listing Sheet
Alex Pfaltzgraff, the city's development services director, put it plainly in an interview with the Business Record: retailers generally will not look at a city until it reaches a population of 15,000 to 20,000. Below that line, a city is invisible to the site selectors who decide where the next Chipotle, coffee shop, or hotel goes. Above it, a city becomes a candidate.
Grimes crossed 15,000 residents around 2020. Every year since has been, in a very literal sense, a campaign to clear the top of that range and stay there. Pfaltzgraff summarized the logic in four words that explain more about Grimes's building patterns than any zoning map: "Rooftops drive everything."
That single idea reframes a lot of what a homebuyer sees driving through Grimes right now. The Hope District, a 200-acre mixed-use development stretching from north of West First Street to Northeast Beaverbrooke Boulevard along Highway 141, did not happen because Grimes had extra land to fill. It happened because the city had, or believed it had, enough rooftops nearby to justify the investment. The district's anchor, the 50-acre Hy-Vee Multiplex, has already drawn more than 137,500 unique visitors and upward of 870,000 total visits since opening. A Tru by Hilton hotel with 116 rooms opened nearby. A Chipotle and a Caribou Coffee followed. City officials said in October 2025 that an Outside Scoop ice cream shop was expected to open before the end of that year. None of that retail showed up by accident. It showed up because someone ran the rooftop math and decided the number worked.
The Count Came Up Short
Here is where the story gets interesting for anyone actually shopping for a home in Grimes right now. The city's own pre-census estimate assumed growth was outpacing what the numbers eventually confirmed.
| Measure | 2020 | 2025 (city estimate) | 2025 (Special Census, confirmed) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Population | 15,392 | 19,116 | 17,809 |
| Housing units | 5,708 | — | 7,578 |
Population grew 15.7 percent between 2020 and the confirmed 2025 count. Housing units grew 32.7 percent over the same stretch, more than double the rate of population growth. Grimes added homes faster than it added people to fill them.
That is not necessarily a warning sign. Iowa's housing market overall has stayed competitive as of mid-2026, with homes across the state continuing to move and prices holding up. But for a city whose growth strategy is explicitly tied to hitting a population threshold, a housing supply that's outrunning population by a two-to-one margin says something specific: Grimes has been building ahead of demonstrated demand, banking on the people to arrive and fill the units already under construction or newly permitted.
Why Your New Subdivision Has an Apartment Community Next Door
This is also the answer to a question a lot of buyers ask without realizing it's an economic development question rather than a builder's preference. Why does a subdivision marketed around detached single-family homes so often sit next to a townhome or apartment project?
Since 2020, more than 5,000 housing units have been proposed in Grimes, spanning single-family, multifamily, townhomes, and condominiums. That mix isn't incidental. Denser product delivers rooftops faster than detached single-family construction does. A four-story apartment building can add hundreds of residents to the count in a single project timeline that would otherwise require a dozen separate subdivisions of half-acre lots.
The clearest recent example sits just outside the Hope District itself. In early 2025, the city rezoned 280 acres from agricultural use to R-4 planned unit development, on land that had belonged to Economy Brick Homes for roughly fifty years before the company left Iowa. Hubbell Realty purchased 160 acres for a project called Founders Glen. Temple Real Estate Services purchased the remaining 115 acres for a project called Harvest Pointe. Together, the two developments are expected to add homes and commercial property assessed at up to $250 million once built out. City officials said at the time they expected site activity to begin by late 2025 or early 2026.
As of 2024 reporting, city officials had also described plans for a gated community of roughly 320 apartments and townhomes on the Hope District's north end, part of a broader vision that includes a town center with retail, restaurants, and green space on the remaining acreage. None of this is single-family growth. It's density, built deliberately, because density is what closes the gap between the population Grimes has and the population its retail ambitions require.
What This Means If You're Comparing Grimes to Waukee, Johnston, or Urbandale
If you're comparing Grimes against its neighbors on the usual criteria, price, commute, school district, you're missing the variable that actually predicts what your street will look like in five years. Grimes is not simply absorbing whatever the market wants to build. It is actively courting a specific kind of growth, and that growth is disproportionately attached and multifamily relative to a place like Urbandale or Clive, which are largely built out and adding density at a much slower, infill pace.
For a move-up family buying a detached home in a newer Grimes subdivision, that means asking a question most buyers never think to ask: what's zoned on the parcels adjacent to and behind this lot, and is any of it part of a planned unit development that allows for higher density than what's currently built. A single-family street today can back up to an approved multifamily parcel that hasn't broken ground yet.
For an investor looking at Grimes townhomes or small multifamily product, the rooftop math cuts the other way. A city that needs population growth to hit its own retail thresholds has every incentive to keep approving denser projects, which supports continued demand for attached and rental product even if single-family absorption slows.
A few questions worth asking before you write an offer or make an investment decision in Grimes:
- Is the specific subdivision part of a larger planned unit development, and if so, what's approved for adjacent phases that haven't been built yet
- Has the parcel behind or beside the lot been rezoned for anything beyond its current use
- What's the timeline the city or developer has given for retail or amenity buildout tied to a specific project, and does that timeline depend on population targets being met
- If buying attached product as an investment, what's the current absorption pace for comparable units in the same PUD
None of this makes Grimes a bad place to buy. The Hope District's retail momentum is real, the multiplex draws real visitors, and the city's population, even at the lower confirmed number, still cleared the threshold that got it noticed by retailers in the first place. But the mechanism behind the growth is not neutral, and buyers who understand it read new construction differently than buyers who assume every subdivision is built purely for the people who'll live in it.
The Takeaway
Grimes is growing because the city has made growth a deliberate target, not a side effect. The 2025 Special Census confirmed real progress, 15.7 percent population growth since 2020, but it also confirmed that the city's own projections ran ahead of reality by more than a thousand residents. Housing supply, meanwhile, grew more than twice as fast as the population meant to fill it. That combination, ambitious rooftop targets paired with housing built ahead of confirmed demand, is exactly the kind of detail that doesn't show up on a listing sheet or a median price chart, but it shapes what your subdivision looks like in five years far more than the number on the sign out front.
If you're weighing a move into Grimes, or trying to figure out what a specific parcel's zoning history means for your resale value or investment plan, Slavin & Partners works this market daily and can walk through the PUD conditions, adjacent zoning, and development timelines that matter for your specific address. Get a Free Home Valuation and let's talk through what's actually planned for the ground around your next home.
