Every summer weekday around noon, the gravel strip between Davis Beachwear and Tacklebox Tavern fills up with trucks and beach chairs stacked in truck beds. People park, walk twenty feet to grab a sandwich, sit in the shade for an hour, and head back out to the sand. It has worked this way for years, long enough that most people who use it assume the town owns it the same way it owns the boardwalk or the beach access points a few hundred feet away.
It doesn't. Atlantic Beach Town Manager John O'Daniel said the quiet part out loud earlier this year: the property owner has held that land for a long time, and the town has simply let the public use it. Now he has decided to build on it. That single fact explains more about what's actually happening at the Circle right now than any of the renderings, festival announcements, or council meeting recaps floating around town.
The Lot Everyone Assumes Is the Town's
O'Daniel put it plainly when asked about the parking impact of a new development called The Grove: there's a public perception that it's public parking, the town owns it, but we don't. That distinction matters because it means the fate of that lot was never up for a town vote. The owner has been generous about letting people park there for free. He is under no obligation to keep doing it.
The Grove itself is not small. Plans call for two multi-story buildings on the site, with roughly 8,000 square feet of commercial space, 29 residential units, and 8 single-family condominium units, plus additional retail. By March 2026, the scale had grown to six or seven stories, tall enough that Mayor Danny Navey noted the buildings could end up taller than the town's water tower. Once a building permit is approved, construction has to start within 18 months. That's the actual clock. Not a vague someday, an 18-month window that starts ticking the moment paperwork clears.
Navey has watched enough proposed projects fizzle at the Circle to be cautious about predictions, but he sounded more certain about this one than most: "I feel like he's gonna build this one." Town officials say they're still looking for ways to preserve some parking once construction starts, but they've also been clear they don't know yet how much will be lost or in what order the phases will go.
Meanwhile, the Town's Own Project Is Moving Fast
While a private landowner works through permitting on a seven-story building, the town's own project at the Circle is comparatively tiny and comparatively quick. In August 2026, the Town Council directed staff to begin permitting a new concrete stage north of the boardwalk, roughly 30 inches high, with colorful shade sails and picnic tables. Navey framed it as a boost for the businesses that already sit along that stretch: "I see it improving these people's lunch business sales." The town is also discussing a new bathhouse and septic system for the same access point, with engineering work expected to start within the following quarter.
The target date tells you something about how the town is thinking. Officials want this phase finished before the Atlantic Beach Music Festival in May 2027. That's a specific, public deadline attached to a project that started moving in August 2026. Compare that timeline to the other big promise still hanging over the Circle, and the difference in speed becomes the whole story.
The Redesign That Won A Global Competition And Still Isn't Built
Back in 2022, Atlantic Beach did something unusual for a town its size. It launched an international design competition to reimagine the boardwalk and the Circle, drawing more than 50 submissions from architecture firms around the world. The field narrowed to three finalists: FORMA out of New York, KUTONOTUK out of Virginia, and Lewis Williams Design out of London. KUTONOTUK's design won.
Four years later, no ground has been broken. Town Manager O'Daniel described the project's status as still kind of on hold, and the reason is the same one that stalls most ambitious plans in small coastal towns: money. Without a major outside funding source, the town has been limited to smaller fixes, restroom and shower renovations, seawall maintenance, the kind of upkeep that keeps the current boardwalk usable without moving the bigger vision forward. In July 2025, the council discussed a resolution tied to the state's Public Beach and Coastal Waterfront Access Program, which suggests the search for funding is still active, but as of this writing there's no construction timeline attached to it.
So the Circle currently has two town-driven projects on two very different clocks. The small stage, approved in August 2026, is aiming for a May 2027 finish. The full boardwalk redesign, selected in 2022, has no finish date at all.
What's Actually Town Property Right Now
It helps to separate what the town controls from what it doesn't, because the two categories are moving at different speeds for a reason.
- Circle Point Grass Lot, Circle Pavilion Paved Lot, and the Circle Gravel/Dirt Lots East and West are part of the town's managed paid parking program, along with the perimeter streets around West Drive, Atlantic Boulevard, and East Drive.
- The lot at the center of The Grove proposal, between Davis Beachwear and Tacklebox Tavern, sits outside that town-managed system. It has functioned as informal public parking because the private owner allowed it, not because the town holds title to it.
- The town did add roughly 50 new parking spaces at the Circle beach access back in spring 2025, a separate improvement from anything tied to The Grove or the stage project.
None of this is a criticism of how the town has managed its own property. It's the reason the parking crunch people are worried about is arriving through a channel the town can't simply vote to stop.
What This Means If You Live Here
If you use the Circle regularly, the practical takeaway isn't complicated, but it does run against the instinct to assume that public complaints or town votes can slow a private development the way they might a town-led one. Watch for building permit news on The Grove specifically. Once that permit is issued, the 18-month construction clock starts, and that's when parking there will actually start to shrink, not before.
Expect the small stage and picnic area to show up well ahead of the boardwalk redesign, because it's a fraction of the cost and already has a public deadline tied to next year's music festival. Don't expect the KUTONOTUK design to break ground on any predictable schedule. It exists on paper, the town's commitment to it hasn't wavered publicly, but coastal infrastructure funding in North Carolina moves on its own timeline, not the town's preferred one.
The town's Ocean Breeze newsletter and its public work session agendas are the most reliable way to track all three threads without waiting for a headline. If you're the kind of resident who plans a Tuesday lunch around parking at that gravel lot, that's the information that actually changes your routine, not the renderings.
The Circle isn't one redevelopment story. It's three, moving at three different speeds, and only two of them belong to the town.
If you're weighing what any of this means for property near the Circle, whether you're watching from a porch a few blocks off Atlantic Boulevard or thinking ahead to a future move, New Bern Property Group tracks these local shifts as part of daily business in Carteret County. Schedule a free consultation with Melissa Rankin when you're ready to talk through what a changing Circle means for property nearby.
