What's Happening in Waveland MS This Summer in 2026?

If you have driven down Coleman Avenue lately, or looked north at the four-story frame rising off Highway 90, you already know the shape of this summer in Waveland. What is less obvious is that these are not one story. They are two, and the city is being deliberate about keeping them that way.

The short version: our commercial life is being rebuilt along two parallel spines, and each one is being asked to do a different job. Coleman is the family-oriented, walk-to-dinner spine. Highway 90 is the traveler-and-tax-base spine. This summer is the first time in twenty years both are moving at once.

The pier is the real deadline on the calendar

Everything else is fun to watch. The pier is the thing most of us are actually counting down to.

Work at Garfield Ladner Pier started in February, with a target completion in October, and Mayor Jay Trapani told WLOX in June that if the summer stays quiet on the weather front, "come October, we'll have people out there fishing again." The project has been sitting in the queue since Hurricane Zeta, and as of early February the city had all funding, FEMA approvals, and paperwork complete, with 180 days written into the contract.

If you moved here after Zeta, the pier is worth understanding as more than a fishing spot. It is the piece of Beach Boulevard that anchors weekend foot traffic on our side of the coast, and its absence is part of why summer evenings on the beach road have felt lighter than they should. October is the month that changes.

Coleman Avenue is filling in one storefront at a time

For twenty years, the standard line about Coleman was that it never came back. That was true, and the numbers behind it were brutal. Before Katrina, more than 30 businesses lined the avenue. A decade later only about seven called Coleman home.

The reason was not lack of interest. It was math. The high-velocity VE flood zone and its base flood elevations meant restrictive construction requirements, limitations on development programming, prohibitive insurance costs, and untenable returns on investment. You could want to open a restaurant there and still not be able to make the pro forma work.

That is the context for why Rickey's returning to Coleman twenty years after Katrina mattered so much to the mayor and the aldermen. It was proof the math had finally shifted. Rickey Peters, who first opened Rickey's in 1999 on Coleman before Katrina took it in 2005, is now open again at 310 Coleman, and by February the mayor was reporting the restaurant had been operating successfully since opening in October.

The rest of the block is following the pattern the mayor predicted the week Rickey's announced. The lot where the former Rickey's Restaurant sat was put on the market and the city fielded a call the same day from a woman interested in opening a business at that location. In June, Trapani told WLOX there are new restaurants opening on Coleman Avenue alongside the ones already up.

He has also been unusually specific about what he does not want Coleman to become:

"I want it to be Waveland. I want it to be more family-oriented. We don't want the two o'clock in the morning music and complaints from the neighbors."

Read that as a planning signal, not just a soundbite. It tells you how the incoming zoning changes are likely to be scoped.

Highway 90 is doing something completely different

If Coleman is the walkable block, US-90 is the tax base. And the arrivals there in the last eighteen months tell you exactly who the city and the Hancock County Port and Harbor Commission are courting.

• The four-story dual-concept Marriott on US-90, combining Fairfield Inn and TownePlace Suites, is targeting its first guests in early September. It is a $16 million project.
• The whole basis for the hotel, per the mayor, is Stennis Space Center, Port Bienville, and the Stennis Airport — workers coming in with no local hotel to stay in.
• 7 Brew opened on the corridor last year.
• Chick-fil-A announced in April that it will build at the northwest corner of Highway 90 and Highway 603, expected to open in early 2027.
• Harbor Freight, Express Oil Change, and McAlister's Deli have all been announced for the corridor.

Blaine LaFontaine, who runs the Port and Harbor Commission, has told reporters that more dining and fast-food franchises want to open in the area. That is the pipeline, and it is not slowing down.

The interesting part is what US-90 is not being asked to be. It is not being pitched as a destination the way downtown Bay St. Louis is. It is a services corridor engineered to keep sales tax and overnight visitor dollars inside Hancock County instead of leaking east to Gulfport or west to St. Tammany. The mayor said the quiet part out loud in June: "We've been losing potential residents to St. Tammany Parish and Harrison County. Now, people have a nice hotel that they can stay in Waveland."

Why the beach itself is not part of either story

This is the piece newcomers still get wrong. Waveland's beachfront is not going to fill in with commercial buildings the way Bay St. Louis has along Beach Boulevard. That is not a market opinion. It is written into how the city governs the shoreline.

The city prohibits commercial buildings on its beaches, meaning the sandy shore will stay free of the bars, restaurants, and other waterfront businesses that dot the rest of the Mississippi Coast. And as of June, Waveland still has no commercial development along Beach Boulevard at all, though the mayor has floated that commercial energy could eventually expand from Coleman toward the beach road.

If you moved here for the quiet beach walk, that policy is the reason it stays quiet.

Compass 2046 is the piece to actually watch

The pier and the Marriott get the headlines. The document that will shape the next twenty years of what opens where is Compass 2046, and the public phase is happening right now.

The last comprehensive plan was adopted in 2010, five years after Katrina, and the mayor has said things have changed so much since then that it was time to do a new one. The current plan is one reason Coleman took so long to move. Trapani has said the existing plan restricts what the city can do on Coleman, and that a new comprehensive plan is what lets them change the zoning ordinance and open it up a little more for development.

Translation for residents: if you have an opinion about what Coleman should look like at night, what should be allowed near the beach road, or how much of US-90 should be commercial versus residential, this is the window when that opinion is being written into policy. The Compass 2046 open house was held June 3 from 5 to 7:30 p.m. at City Hall, and the planning process continues through the summer.

What this summer actually looks like for you

Put the pieces together and the practical version of the season is something like this:

1. Through August: Coleman is worth a Friday or Saturday walk again. Rickey's is the anchor. The rest of the block is starting to fill in around it.
2. Early September: The Marriott opens on Highway 90. Expect visible traffic changes at Old Spanish Trail and 90, and expect visiting family to have a real option other than driving to Bay St. Louis or Slidell.
3. October: Garfield Ladner Pier reopens for fishing, assuming the weather cooperates. That is the moment Beach Boulevard evenings start to feel like Beach Boulevard evenings again.
4. Ongoing: Compass 2046 hearings. If you own a house within a few blocks of Coleman or Beach Boulevard, the zoning decisions coming out of this process will affect your street for a generation.

A note for anyone thinking about their house in all of this

None of the above is a sales pitch. It is a snapshot of a city that is genuinely changing shape after two decades of holding still. The reason we mention it at the end of a resident-focused post is that these are exactly the kinds of shifts that quietly reset what a home is worth, what a block feels like on a Saturday morning, and what a buyer from Metairie is willing to pay for a lot two streets off the water.

If any of that is on your mind, whether you are staying put and just curious what your place is worth now versus five years ago, or you are thinking further ahead, Glenn-Marie Fitzgerald lives and works on this coast and pays close attention to what each block is actually doing. Get Your Home Value — Start Here, or reach out for a conversation that is not on a clock.