Drive down Pamplico Highway this week and you will pass the new drive-thru lane at Florence's first 7 Brew stand, already running. Head into downtown and you will pass a construction fence around a future apartment building named for a hotel that stood on that same corner back in the 1800s. Both are proof that Florence is changing. Neither is proof of the same thing.
That distinction matters if you have lived here long enough to notice both projects without connecting them. The Pamplico Highway boom is retail chasing rooftops and car counts. The downtown push is the city betting on housing to create rooftops that do not exist yet. One follows demand. The other is trying to manufacture it. Understanding which is which tells you more about where Florence is actually headed than any single opening ever could.
The Corridor That Follows the Traffic
7 Brew's Florence stand opened Monday, August 3, at 141 Pamplico Highway, bringing about 50 new jobs to the area. Before this location, the closest 7 Brew to Florence was in Myrtle Beach, roughly an hour and a half away, which made the opening less a novelty and more an access fix for the whole Pee Dee region.
It is not opening in isolation. The stand shares a parking lot with Farmer's Home Furniture and joins a stretch of Pamplico Highway that already includes Slim Chickens, Baskin Robbins, Jersey Mike's, El Dos Agaves, and Notch8. That is not a coincidence of timing. It is a corridor that has crossed some threshold of daily traffic and nearby rooftops where national drive-thru and fast-casual brands now pencil out. Nobody planned this cluster the way the city planned Urban Square downtown. It formed because the math started working.
The same logic explains the slower rollout of Bojangles' Florence footprint. The chain's walk-up-only location opened in downtown Florence in October 2025, serving chicken sandwiches and biscuits but skipping the bone-in fried chicken and drive-thru that define a full Bojangles. A second, traditional location with a drive-thru was under construction on Hoffmeyer Road, targeted for a spring 2026 opening. That split tells you something too: downtown got the small-format experiment, and the highway got the version built for volume.
The Corridor the City Is Building on Purpose
Downtown Florence is not waiting for traffic to justify itself. On December 18, 2025, developer Styx Companies broke ground on the Gamble Apartments, a 102-unit building at the corner of Coit and Baroody streets, named for the Gamble Hotel that once stood on that site. It sits within Urban Square, a redevelopment zone the city carved out specifically because it stretches beyond what most residents think of as the historic district, reaching into the Coit, McQueen, and West Evans street corridor. City officials have called it one of the largest private investments downtown has ever seen, with a minimum of $65 million in improvements planned for the block.
The reasoning behind it is worth sitting with. Florence's Planning Director cited a study at an October 2025 Planning Commission meeting showing downtown needs roughly 1,000 more housing units over the next 10 to 20 years to support the commercial growth already underway. That gap has been on the city's radar for a while. Back in 2023, when the first phase of Urban Square broke ground, Assistant City Manager Clint Moore put the downtown occupancy rate at around 6 percent. In other words, the restaurants and bars downtown have been succeeding largely on visitors and daytime workers, not residents. The Gamble Apartments and the townhomes and office space planned for later phases are an attempt to fix that by putting people where the restaurants already are, rather than waiting for a new restaurant corridor to justify itself the way Pamplico Highway did.
You can already see the kind of food scene the city is trying to backstop. Downcountry Grill, from the owners of King Jefe and Tubb's Shrimp & Fish Co., runs breakfast and lunch service near downtown inside HopeHealth's Medical Plaza on North Irby Street, built for staff and workers who need something fast on a weekday. On West Evans Street, inside the Urban Square footprint, restaurateur Feeling Schumann expanded Angry Chicken by opening Takoyaki Restaurant and Bar next door. Town Hall, led by executive chef Ryan Dalton, has built a name on farm-driven Southern cooking in Florence. None of these are chains chasing a traffic count. They are locally owned bets on a downtown the city is actively trying to repopulate.
Two Speeds, Side by Side
| Pamplico Highway | Downtown / Urban Square | |
|---|---|---|
| What's driving it | Existing traffic and rooftops | City-led housing investment |
| Recent addition | 7 Brew, opened August 3, 2026 | Gamble Apartments, groundbreaking December 18, 2025 |
| Business type | National fast-casual and drive-thru | Independently owned restaurants |
| What it needs to work | Car counts already in place | New residents who don't exist yet |
| Completion horizon | Already open | Late 2026 or early 2027 |
Neither approach is better. They are just different bets, and knowing which one you are standing in front of changes what you should expect next. Pamplico Highway will likely keep filling in as long as the traffic holds. Downtown's trajectory depends on whether the Gamble Apartments lease up the way the city is counting on.
What a Saturday Looks Like Right Now
None of this changes the fact that Florence in August has a genuinely full calendar if you know where to look. The Florence Flamingos play every home game at 7 p.m. with gates opening at 6, and Carolina Bank Field has carried a slightly higher profile than usual this season after hosting the 2026 Coastal Plain League All-Star Game on July 6 and 7. If baseball isn't the plan, the Rotary Club of Florence is holding the Forget Me Not 5K through downtown on August 15, a family-friendly run that doubles as a decent excuse to see the Urban Square construction up close on foot.
For a lower-key evening, that means you can start at 7 Brew on Pamplico Highway for a coffee before a ballgame, or spend the whole night downtown between Town Hall and Angry Chicken's new Takoyaki spot on West Evans Street. Both routes work. They just work for different reasons.
One Honest Caveat
A lot of what makes this moment interesting is still under construction, literally. The Gamble Apartments are not expected to be finished until late 2026 or early 2027, so the downtown foot traffic the city is counting on hasn't fully arrived yet. The Hoffmeyer Road Bojangles was targeting a spring 2026 opening as of this past January, and if you haven't driven by recently, it's worth checking rather than assuming. Growth this uneven rewards paying attention over the next few months more than it rewards drawing conclusions today.
Florence isn't building one thing right now. It's running two different experiments at the same time, in two different parts of town, for two different reasons. That's worth knowing whether you're deciding where to grab dinner this week or just trying to make sense of why the city feels different than it did a year ago.
If you're curious how any of this touches property values, rental demand, or what a home near either corridor might be worth down the road, the team at Half Moon Realty knows this market block by block. Contact us anytime you want a straight answer.
