If you've driven Old Steese Highway anytime in the last year, you've probably slowed down at the same spot everyone else does. There's a building there with a completed parking lot, working lights, and a sign that says Raising Cane's. It has looked ready to open since sometime in early 2025. It has not opened. For most of that time, nobody could tell you why.
That single empty building has become one of the more reliable topics of conversation in Fairbanks, the kind of thing that shows up in neighborhood Facebook groups with the same energy as a school closure announcement. One resident wrote to the Daily News-Miner in December just to catalog the theories circulating online, everything from staffing trouble to, memorably, money laundering. The real explanation turned out to be duller: a corporate restructuring between Raising Cane's and its franchise partner delayed the opening for well over a year before anyone in Fairbanks saw a single chicken finger.
That story is fun. It is also, in a way, a distraction. While an entire town has been refreshing the same parking lot camera, a much less visible chain of decisions has been reshaping the blocks around it, and the numbers behind those decisions tell you something the chicken restaurant never could.
Two Years Since Groundbreaking, and Still No Ribbon Cutting
Here's the timeline, as best it can be pieced together. Construction on the Fairbanks Raising Cane's started in August 2024. By the time a Daily News-Miner photographer shot the building sitting dark in mid-January 2026, the interior had reportedly been finished for close to a year. Company spokesperson Ali Urbick told the paper the delay traced back to a corporate restructuring: Panda Restaurant Group partnered with ELPX Restaurant Group, owned by Eddie Wang, to form a new entity called Pacific Rim Cane's in November 2025, and that shakeup is what finally got the stalled Fairbanks opening moving again.
By late March, the company was holding a two-day hiring event downtown, aiming to bring on 7 to 10 managers and another 100 to 120 crew members through May, with brand leader Frank McCool naming August as the ideal opening window. As of this writing, no firm grand opening date for the Fairbanks location has been announced. What we do know is that this month happens to be a big one for the chain nationally. Raising Cane's turns 30 this August, marking three decades since its first restaurant opened in Baton Rouge, and the company has confirmed a wave of new store openings tied to that anniversary. Whether Fairbanks lands inside that wave or just after it, the wait appears to be entering its final stretch.
None of that is really the story, though. It's the excuse everyone in town has been using to talk about something bigger.
The Money That's Actually Moving This Year
Downtown Fairbanks has a vacancy problem that's been an open secret for years, and 2026 is the first year two different organizations have gone after it with real money at the same time, using two very different approaches.
The City of Fairbanks runs the Storefront Improvement Program, now in its second year. It's a reimbursable grant, dollar for dollar, up to $50,000 per project, funded out of the city's bed tax revenue on hotel and short-term rental stays. It covers exterior work only: paint, signage, awnings, windows, doors, that kind of thing. The program area runs from 1st Avenue to 10th Avenue and from Cowles Street to Noble Street. In its first year, the city handed out nearly all of a $250,000 pool across two rounds, which pulled in close to $700,000 in matching private investment, a real signal that business owners were willing to put their own money on the table.
Separately, and more recently, the Downtown Association of Fairbanks launched its own incentive using donor and sponsor funds rather than city dollars. It's a smaller pool, $25,000 total, split between $10,000 for restaurants (up to $5,000 each) and $15,000 for other business types (up to $3,000 each toward rent or improvement costs). DAF Executive Director David van den Berg has been direct about why it exists, describing the downtown vacancy rate as higher than ideal and the incentive as a tool to fill empty storefronts rather than dress up occupied ones.
Why the Small Program Is Outrunning the Big One
Here's the part that doesn't show up in either press release.
The city's storefront program is bigger, better funded, and got there first, but by early 2026, only one project, the facade work at Co-Op Plaza on Second Avenue, had made real progress. City Chief of Staff Michael Sanders was candid about why:
"A lot of the applicants weren't able to get contractors on board in time."
He added that most of the delayed projects should wrap up sometime this summer.
DAF's incentive program, meanwhile, was piloted quietly at the end of 2025 with a fraction of the budget, and it secured four new downtown tenants using just $3,200 in incentive money. That's roughly $800 per new tenant, against a program that spent close to $250,000 to finish one facade.
The comparison isn't really about which program is better run. It's about what each one is actually buying. A storefront grant pays for construction, and construction in Fairbanks runs into the same seasonal contractor bottleneck that slows down every home renovation and remodel in Interior Alaska during peak building months. A leasing incentive just requires a signature. One moves at the speed of Fairbanks summer construction. The other moves at the speed of paperwork.
| Program | Funding source | What it pays for | Cap per project | 2025-26 result |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Storefront Improvement Program (City of Fairbanks) | Hotel bed tax revenue | Exterior renovation, signage, paint, windows | Up to $50,000, dollar-for-dollar match | ~$250,000 awarded, one project (Co-Op Plaza) substantially finished as of early 2026, rest delayed by contractor availability |
| New Business Incentive (Downtown Association of Fairbanks) | Private donors and sponsors | Rent and improvement costs tied to signing a lease | Up to $5,000 (restaurants) or $3,000 (other) | $3,200 spent, four new tenants secured in the 2025 pilot |
If you're trying to understand why some storefronts downtown suddenly have fresh paint while others just as suddenly have new tenants and no visible construction, this is the mechanism. Two different kinds of change, moving on two different clocks.
What Else Changed While Everyone Was Watching the Drive-Thru
The storefront money isn't the only thing happening downtown this year, and most of it has gone unnoticed for the same reason: it's not as fun to talk about as fried chicken.
- Lacey Street closed to traffic for the summer starting May 1, partly to allow repainting of the Lacey Street Theater and partly to help activate what the Downtown Association is calling the "Starter Block," a stretch of Lacey Street the association wants to turn into more of a pedestrian draw.
- The city launched the Golden Heart Step Up Challenge, a walkability competition among downtown businesses and organizations kicking off June 1, timed to the same summer stretch most of the storefront work is supposed to finish.
- The city also quietly tested interest in two vacant municipal properties this spring, the log cabin at Golden Heart Plaza and the so-called Polaris site, by asking potential buyers or lessees what they'd want to do with each. The log cabin drew eight responses. The Polaris site drew zero, a useful reminder that not every vacant downtown property is equally attractive, even with the city actively looking for takers.
- On the regulatory side, the city and borough have also lowered off-street parking requirements for downtown businesses and started allowing residential space on the ground floor of some buildings in the central business district, both aimed at making it cheaper to build or convert space downtown in the first place.
None of these are dramatic on their own. Together, they describe a downtown that's being worked on from several directions at once, by people with different budgets and different tools, in a year when the only thing most residents have actually noticed is a chicken restaurant that still hasn't turned its lights on for customers.
So, About That Chicken
It'll open. The company has said August is the target for over four months now, and this is the month Raising Cane's is celebrating 30 years by opening restaurants around the country. Whether Fairbanks makes it into that specific wave or opens a few weeks later, the wait is close to over.
But if you want to understand what's actually different about downtown Fairbanks this year, the better place to look isn't Old Steese Highway. It's Second Avenue, where a plaza got its facade work substantially done while other applicants were still waiting on contractors. It's Lacey Street, closed all summer for a theater and a block nobody's named yet outside of a newsletter. It's a log cabin that drew interest and a lot next to it that drew none. Small, unglamorous, and genuinely more telling than the drive-thru everyone's been photographing.
Ginger Orem has spent three decades watching Fairbanks change block by block, which tends to make you notice the quiet stuff as much as the loud stuff. If you're curious about what's happening in a particular part of town, or just want to talk shop about the Interior Alaska market with someone who's tracked it since 1994, reach out to Ginger Orem. Let's Connect.
