Drive Fairview Road through Oakley on a Sunday morning and you will pass, in order: a farmers market setting up in a church parking lot, a fenced construction site wrapped around an old metal building, a produce stand tucked back on Lora Lane with a wood-fired pizza oven already going, and a fire station that has served the neighborhood largely unchanged for decades. None of these four things are new information to anyone who lives here. What is new is that they are all in motion at the same time, on the same half-mile of road, for the first time in the neighborhood's history.
Oakley has never had a downtown. Not a small one, not a historic one that faded, not one that residents complain got torn down. It simply never built one, and that absence has shaped daily life here for longer than most people realize.
A Neighborhood Built Without a Center
Oakley grew up along what used to be called Hickory Nut Gap Road, the old route up from Charlotte through the mountain gaps, long before it became Fairview Road. Small residential developments strung out along both sides of it starting in the 1890s. Oakley is often described as a planned community built in 1926 to house workers at the nearby Sayles Bleachery, but the fuller history is messier: an amalgam of small subdivisions that grew up piecemeal over three decades rather than one deliberate plan. In 1922, when the city hired landscape planner John Nolen to draw up a growth plan for Asheville's expanding suburbs, Oakley sat just outside the city line and outside the plan's direct scope. It benefited from the general push toward development but never got the deliberate commercial core that Nolen's plan encouraged elsewhere.
That construction boom stalled around 1926 and stopped entirely with the 1929 crash. Oakley stayed a working-class, unincorporated area for another three decades, home to blue-collar and middle-class families who traveled into Asheville proper for shopping and entertainment because there wasn't much of either close to home. In 1960, the city annexed Oakley along with Beverly Hills and several other outlying communities, extending Asheville's boundary by eight square miles. The vote was closer than you'd expect from today's vantage point, with affected residents approving it by roughly 6,200 to 3,800. City services arrived over the following six months. A commercial spine never did.
Compare that to Kenilworth, platted in the same general era with a town hall, churches, and an inn built right into the original plan. Oakley's closest thing to a civic anchor became the Murphy-Oakley Community Center, named for a family who helped develop the neighborhood and built on land that used to be farmland and apple orchards. It's a real gathering place. It is also the kind of thing a neighborhood gets when the city builds it for you rather than something a neighborhood grows for itself.
By the time Mountain Xpress covered plans for a small farm store on Fairview Road years ago, the paper described Oakley plainly: no central business district, no grocery store, no coffee shop or restaurant to speak of, a designation from the U.S. Department of Agriculture as an urban food desert. That characterization is not new. What's genuinely new is that four separate projects are now working to change it at the same time, on the same road.
The Farm That's Been Quietly Filling the Gap
Long before any of the current construction started, Gladheart Farm had already begun doing the slow work of giving Oakley somewhere to go. The farm sits at 9 Lora Lane, just off Fairview Road, and runs its Farm Fest Market every Sunday from mid-March through late December, 11 a.m. to 3 p.m., with produce, heritage grain bread, wood-fired pizza, and live music on the farm itself. It has operated some version of this market for years already, long enough that it barely registers as news to longtime residents, which is exactly why it's easy to undercount as part of the bigger story.
A few hundred yards away, a second and more traditional market runs out of the Oakley United Methodist Church parking lot at 607 Fairview Road. That's two distinct farmers markets serving the same small neighborhood, which says something about the appetite for a gathering spot even before either one built anything permanent.
The Bigger Bet Two Blocks Down
The higher-profile move on the corridor belongs to chef Jacob Sessoms, a two-time James Beard Award nominee whose Montford restaurant All Day Darling has served counter-service breakfast, lunch, and dinner out of a converted gas station since 2018 and picked up a recommendation in the Michelin Guide in 2025. On March 19, 2026, Sessoms broke ground on a second location at 567 Fairview Road, inside the former Filter Supply building next door to Asheville Fire Protection.
The project has moved slower than early announcements suggested. When it was first reported in 2024, the goal was an opening before the end of 2025. That timeline slipped, enough that by the middle of last year an Oakley resident asked in an online forum whether the project was still happening at all. It is. Construction is underway now, with the Oakley location expected to open sometime in 2027, and the design will lean bigger than the Montford original: an expanded dinner menu, additional bakery items, and a fuller bar program built around wine, beer, and a full bar menu.
"We've been looking at East Asheville for years," Sessoms has said of the decision. The team bought the property roughly three years before breaking ground, which tells you the bet on Oakley predates most of the other activity on this list.
I've spent enough years around commercial kitchens, including running my own food truck in Asheville before I got into real estate, to know how much has to line up before a chef with Sessoms' reputation commits to a second location in a neighborhood with no existing restaurant scene to plug into. That's not a small signal.
The City Shows Up Too
Private investment on Fairview Road isn't happening in isolation. In June 2026, city officials unveiled a design concept for a new Fire Station 9, the first phase of the broader Oakley Public Safety Complex initiative. The new station will replace the current Asheville Police Department Oakley Resource Center at 711 Fairview Road, with the existing fire station eventually giving up its spot as well. The design still has steps to clear before construction, which the city expects to begin sometime in 2027 or 2028, but the fact that public safety infrastructure is being modernized on the same road, in the same window, as the private food investments is not a coincidence worth ignoring.
What's Actually Open Right Now
If you live in Oakley and want to know what you can walk into today versus what you're waiting on, here's the honest split.
Open and running:
- Gladheart Farm's Sunday Farm Fest Market, 9 Lora Lane, 11 a.m. to 3 p.m., seasonal through late December
- The Oakley Farmers' Market at Oakley United Methodist Church, 607 Fairview Road
Under construction or in design:
- All Day Darling's second location, 567 Fairview Road, targeting a 2027 opening
- The new Fire Station 9 and Oakley Public Safety Complex, design finalized in late 2026, construction expected 2027 to 2028
That gap between what's real now and what's still years out matters if you're the kind of person who plans your weekend around what's nearby. The two markets are genuinely worth building a Sunday around today. The restaurant and the fire station are worth watching, not waiting on.
Why This Matters More Than a Roundup
None of these four projects would mean much on their own. A farm market is a farm market. A restaurant groundbreaking is one building permit. A fire station redesign barely makes local news most years. What makes this moment different for Oakley is that all four are landing on the same corridor at the same time, in a neighborhood that has gone its entire hundred-plus-year existence without a commercial center of its own.
Oakley was annexed rather than built up. It was labeled a food desert rather than a food destination. For most of its history, the gap between what Oakley had and what a neighborhood like Kenilworth had was simply accepted as part of living here. What's happening on Fairview Road right now is the first real attempt, from both a chef with a Michelin nod and the city itself, to close that gap on purpose. Whether it adds up to an actual downtown or just a handful of good stops on the same street, it's worth watching from a lawn chair rather than reading about it somewhere else first.
If you're already in Oakley and want to talk through what any of this might mean for your own corner of the neighborhood, or you're just curious how a place with this kind of history tends to hold its value over time, I'm always glad to talk it through. Reach out to Nate Kelly anytime. Let's Connect.
