Grimes Tripled in Twenty Years. The Old Downtown Is Still There.

Grimes was a town of about 5,000 people in the 2000 Census. By 2020, it was over 15,000 — nearly $800 million in new development since 2019, a state "Iowa Great Place" designation in 2023, and the GrimesPlex sports complex going in as one of the largest multi-sport turf facilities in the Midwest. It's the kind of growth number that sounds like it erased whatever was there before.

It didn't, quite. Grimes was incorporated back in 1894, named after a former Iowa governor, and had an actual working downtown — a hotel, a bank, a canning factory — decades before any of the current boom started. That older core is still there, just surrounded now by a much bigger city than it used to anchor. The housing split follows the same line: Cape Cods, Craftsman, and ranch homes from Grimes' small-town decades, next to new construction in Autumn Park, Heritage at Grimes, and the other subdivisions built in the last ten years.

• Updates and renovations to the older homes near Grimes' original core, which don't get the same attention as the new subdivisions but are often solidly built
• Additions and remodels in the newer developments, for families who bought into the boom and are already outgrowing the house
• General contracting across both, since Grimes is growing too fast for most contractors to have caught up with all of it

The GrimesPlex gets the headlines. We're more interested in what's happening at the house level.