For most of the last three decades, "the bypass is coming" has been Yelm's version of a running joke. Ask a longtime resident about the light at Yelm Avenue and 1st Street, and you'll likely hear some version of the same shrug: they've been promising a way around downtown since before some current homeowners were born.
This year the shrug has a different ending. Utility crews finished relocating lines near Walmart Boulevard months ago, the project has gone through competitive bidding, and Washington's Department of Transportation now lists construction starting this summer, the same summer you're reading this. For the first time in a story that started in the 1990s, the people running the project are using the word "finally" without irony.
A promise with a thirty-year paper trail
The idea for what's now called the Yelm Loop, or the Yelm Bypass, dates back to traffic planning from the 1990s. The first 1.17-mile section opened in October 2010 at a cost of $4.3 million, connecting a roundabout near Mudd Run Road east to Cullens Road. The second phase, the three remaining miles that would carry regional traffic all the way to SR 507, sat unfunded for years after that. The state legislature earmarked money for it in 2015, an environmental assessment cleared in 2021, and then, according to Mayor Joe DePinto, the timeline slipped backward again: when he took office in 2022, the project had been pushed to 2032.
DePinto says he met directly with Governor Jay Inslee and later Governor Bob Ferguson to argue the case, along with the chairs of the House and Senate transportation committees. Whatever combination of persistence and budget alignment made the difference, the project is now fully designed, right-of-way acquisition is done, and WSDOT lists construction beginning in summer 2026, with the corridor estimated to cost $58.5 million and completion projected for fall 2029.
Yelm's public works director, Cody Colt, put the moment in personal terms to the Nisqually Valley News earlier this year:
"I've lived here and have been told that the bypass is coming for the last 30 years. I have that same tentative excitement because I always see how things go. But we've never been to the point we're at now."
That's not a marketing line. It's a public works director telling a local paper that this time is measurably different, and the paper's own reporting backs him up on the specifics: utility relocation finished, geoengineering for stormwater already underway, and bids that actually closed instead of stalling.
What actually starts this summer
The visible piece for most residents will be the roundabout at Walmart Boulevard and SR 507. Colt told the Nisqually Valley News back in January to expect "mid-to-late summer" activity there, and WSDOT's own project page confirms the corridor has cleared bidding with construction starting this summer. A second roundabout follows at Walmart Boulevard and 104th Street SE, with Colt estimating both should be finished by spring or summer of 2027. After that, crews move to sections of the corridor that run off the main path and shouldn't disrupt daily traffic as much, mostly around Cullens Road, Rhoton Road, and Flume Road, which will keep full access as stop-controlled intersections where they meet the new roadway.
Three smaller streets don't fare as well. Crystal Springs Road, Railway Road, and Canal Road will each dead-end into a cul-de-sac on either side of the new loop rather than crossing it, a detail worth knowing if you live near any of them. The Yelm Prairie Line Trail gets a pedestrian tunnel under the new roadway instead, connecting to a new shared-use path that runs alongside the loop for the length of the project. WSDOT has also flagged the older View Royale neighborhood, built before the roadway plan became public record in February 2000, as eligible for a noise wall roughly 1,291 feet long on the south side of the right of way between Crystal Springs and Rhoton Road.
WSDOT states the project's purpose plainly on its own site: relieve congestion in downtown Yelm, especially the kind that gets worse when regional drivers divert around backups on I-5. That's the mechanism worth sitting with. The loop was never really about speeding up regional trips through the area. It's about pulling that traffic off Yelm Avenue entirely, which happens to be the same street where the city has spent recent years investing in things that only make sense if fewer cars are driving through and more people are walking around.
The city bet on walking before the traffic left
That's the part that makes this summer different from just "a road is finally getting built." While WSDOT works on the bypass, the City of Yelm has been running its own parallel bet on downtown, and the two projects were planned to land close together on purpose.
The clearest example is the Activated Alleyway project, a streetscape overhaul of the half-block corridor east and west of 2nd Street. The city's own project page describes new pavers, concrete accent bands, landscaping, seating, and catenary lighting strung overhead, first sketched out in the city's 2019 Downtown Transportation Strategy and now moving toward an estimated $1.5 million construction phase on top of roughly $500,000 already spent on design and property acquisition. The city is explicit about what the space is for. As Colt told Business View Magazine, "We're going to put our farmers market over there; we're going to have food trucks there."
That alley sits inside a larger civic vision Colt and DePinto have described in the same Business View Magazine interview: a future civic center that would eventually move city hall and the library into the downtown core alongside the police department and municipal court, all within walking distance of each other. "You'll have everything you need to access in one area," Colt said. "You can park and just walk to everything you need." That's not a passive hope that foot traffic shows up once cars stop cutting through. It's a specific, funded sequence of infrastructure decisions timed to a road project with a construction start date.
Two blocks that already look different
You don't have to wait for the alleyway to finish to see the change. Yelm City Park has added a splash pad, a wheelchair accessible swing, and a new performance space called the Centennial Stage, which has already become the city's default venue for community events and live performances rather than something built and left empty.
A few blocks away, a former railway bridge across the Nisqually River has been restored and converted into a pedestrian crossing, extending the Yelm Prairie Line Trail across the river for the first time. That phase of the trail ran into a construction snag over the winter when a batch of concrete slabs came in out of spec and caused puddling across the trestle. Colt told the city council in February he expected the replacement slabs to have the problem solved, which puts the trestle back in working order well ahead of this summer. The same council update floated a plan for a love lock fence on the trestle itself, the kind where couples who make the 3.5-mile walk out can attach a padlock with both their names. Whether that detail has actually gone up yet or is still on the drawing board, it's the sort of small civic gesture that only gets proposed for a trail the city expects people to use.
Who's filling in the storefronts
The restaurant and retail mix on Yelm Avenue has shifted enough in the past year that longtime residents driving through for the first time in a while will notice. Some of the newer names:
- Gritz N Gravy, an all-day breakfast spot at 103 Yelm Ave. from owners Jamie and Trevor Metz, who bring 30 years of combined restaurant experience to their first concept together
- Farrelli's Pizza, which opened at 813 W Yelm Avenue with weekly Team Trivia Tuesday nights and a staff that includes Yelm High School graduates
- Uptown Lounge, 507 Taproom & Filling Station, and Steele Barrel BBQ Company, three of the names locals point to most often when the downtown dining rotation comes up
- Red Lantern, a longer-standing local favorite for Asian food
- Yelm Pho, sharing the same stretch of the main strip as Gritz N Gravy, according to Colt's own rundown of the block
At the edge of downtown, Yelm Cinemas is marking 25 years in business after a remodel roughly a decade ago that added a 21-and-up dining lounge, bottomless popcorn and soda, and reclining leather seats, evidence that some of what makes downtown feel different this year is new investment layered on top of businesses that were already anchors.
Where to catch the market before it moves
If you want to see the current version of downtown before more of these pieces land, the Yelm Farmers Market still runs Saturdays from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m., May through September, on McKenzie Avenue beside Yelm City Park. Given the city's stated plan to eventually give the market a new home in the activated alleyway, this season on McKenzie Avenue may be one of its last in that exact spot.
None of these projects are large on their own. A splash pad, a pizza place, a repaved alley, a bridge over a river. What makes this summer worth paying attention to is that they're all landing at the same time as a road project that finally has a construction crew instead of a promise, and the timing isn't an accident. The city spent the years while it waited for funding building the reasons to walk downtown instead of drive through it.
If you're watching Yelm's momentum and wondering what it means for a property you already own or one you're considering, Morrison House Sotheby's International Realty knows this stretch of Pierce County and the South Sound well enough to talk through it plainly. Request a private consultation whenever you're ready.
