Drive the corner of 23 Mile Road and North Avenue after dark now and you will see three canopies lit up instead of two. The Mobil on the northwest corner recently added a quick-service restaurant inside its convenience store. A former BP sits nearby. And since Wednesday, August 12, a 24-hour Sheetz has been pumping gas and grilling made-to-order food on the southeast corner, on the lot where a CVS Pharmacy used to sit.
If you have lived in Macomb Township for a while, you probably remember the CVS. What you may not know is how long it took to get a Sheetz there instead, or why a Macomb County gas station owner ended up escorted out of a public meeting by police over it. The short version is that this one intersection just became a preview of how Sheetz is expanding across the entire county, and that expansion is unfolding at the same time the township is spending real money to build something that looks nothing like a gas station row a few miles up the road.
The corner that didn't need a fourth option
The lot at the southeast corner of North Avenue and 23 Mile had an odd zoning history working against it. Back in 2006, the township struck an agreement that would set the parcel's zoning to C-3 commercial if the CVS ever closed. That designation is meant for larger retail uses on lots of five acres or more, and this lot didn't qualify, which left it sitting as a nonconforming property once CVS shut its doors.
The Township Board of Trustees cleared that up on May 14, 2025, rezoning the parcel from C-3 to C-2 to bring it in line with the zoning on the other three corners of that intersection. Township Land Development Director James Van Tiflin told trustees the mismatch had only recently come to light through a new application, and staff felt C-2 fit the corner better. Supervisor Frank Viviano confirmed around the same time that Sheetz had its eye on the site, though he was careful to note the rezoning wasn't done as a favor to the chain specifically, saying either designation would have worked for a future tenant.
That rezoning is what made a third gas station at that corner possible. It's also what set up a fight nobody expected to get so loud.
A year of paperwork and one removal by police
The Macomb Township Planning Commission took up the Sheetz site plan on June 3, 2025, and the meeting did not stay calm. Eddie Jawad, who runs Jawad Group Investments and owns roughly 20 gas stations across southeast Michigan, told the commission he had signatures from a thousand residents opposed to the project. He was eventually removed by police after an outburst directed at commission members, a scene reported by both FOX 2 Detroit and WXYZ.
The residents who spoke that night raised concerns that will sound familiar to anyone who has watched a big chain move into a small township: traffic backing up at an already busy intersection, light pollution from 24-hour operations, pressure on nearby property values, and worry that a national chain with deep pockets could squeeze out smaller local operators. One frustrated business owner asked the commission directly how many gas stations the township actually needed, pointing out that between what was already built and what was under construction nearby, the answer felt like too many.
The commission approved the plan anyway, and the Board of Trustees followed. Fourteen months later, the pumps are running.
Why Macomb County keeps winning this race
The fight over one corner in Macomb Township is a small piece of a much bigger pattern. Sheetz only entered Michigan in August 2024, opening its first store in Romulus near Detroit Metro Airport. By February 2026, Crain's Detroit Business reported the chain had already secured approval for 21 Michigan locations, and half of those approvals were in Macomb County alone. By the time the 23 Mile and North Avenue store opened in August 2026, it had become one of five Sheetz locations already operating in Macomb County, out of 11 open statewide, according to figures reported by the Detroit Free Press.
That count is expected to keep climbing fast. Sheetz has said it plans to have close to 20 stores open in Michigan by the end of 2026, part of a roughly $500 million investment aimed at building 50 to 60 locations across southeast Michigan over five to six years.
It helps to see why so much of that growth has landed in this county specifically. Warren's city council currently has a moratorium on new gas stations and car washes, which has complicated Sheetz's plans for a location there. Farmington Hills and Livonia city councils both rejected proposed Sheetz sites after residents raised concerns about crime, noise, and light pollution. Roseville approved a Sheetz plan that involves demolishing the former Sacred Heart Catholic Church and the former Apple Annie's Kitchen and Bakery, a project a Macomb County Circuit Court judge allowed to proceed in December 2025 after a lawsuit tried to block it. Fraser approved its own Sheetz on the site of the historic former State Bank of Fraser building, which opened in May 2026 after the city council approved a conditional rezoning despite initial rejection from its own planning commission.
Set against those roadblocks and reversals elsewhere, Macomb Township's willingness to rezone and approve looks less like an isolated decision about one CVS lot and more like the reason the township keeps landing on Sheetz's list.
What actually opened
Setting the zoning fight aside, the store itself follows the standard format Sheetz has built across the state: a 6,100-square-foot convenience store, open 24 hours a day, with outdoor cafe seating and a staff of 30 to 35 employees. It's the chain's third location within Macomb Township specifically, joining two others already running along Hall Road, one at Garfield Road and one at Gratiot Avenue.
The grand opening on August 12 followed the company's usual playbook: a ribbon cutting, gift card drawings throughout the morning, and giveaways for the first customers through the door. When Sheetz opened its New Baltimore location the previous September, the company marked the occasion with $2,500 donations each to Special Olympics Michigan and Forgotten Harvest. Whether a similar gesture accompanied the Macomb Township opening wasn't part of the coverage, but it fits the pattern of how the chain has tried to soften its arrival in communities that didn't always want it.
A few miles north, a different bet entirely
Here is the part that makes the Sheetz story worth more than a shrug. While that corner was absorbing its third fuel stop, Macomb Township broke ground on something built to be its opposite.
On June 23, 2026, township officials gathered for the start of the $22.5 million Broughton Road Extension, a project that will stretch Broughton Road a mile and a half through to 24 Mile Road. Supervisor Viviano described the finished project as a boulevard with roundabouts and street parking, designed specifically to draw new businesses and mixed-use development rather than another drive-through or fuel island. Construction on 24 Mile Road between Foss Road and Romeo Plank Road began July 6, 2026, and that stretch is expected to stay closed to through traffic for roughly six months while the roundabout work proceeds.
Viviano didn't frame this as just another road project. He called it the creation of a real downtown for northern Macomb County, a place he said the township has lacked: somewhere residents could gather, walk up and down a street, and hold festivals. A former board member who worked on early versions of the plan, identified in coverage only as Brennan, said he was glad to see the current administration carry the idea further than originally planned. And Kristen Arruda, a resident who moved to the township from Clinton Township five years ago, said the renderings she saw at the groundbreaking left her impressed with the design work.
Grant funding is covering roughly two-thirds of the cost, more than $14 million, with the township picking up the rest.
Put the two projects side by side and the contrast is hard to miss. One corner of the township just added its third gas station after a fight residents lost. A few miles away, the township is spending its own capital and a mountain of grant money trying to build the kind of walkable, mixed-use gathering space that a gas station corner, by definition, can never become. Both are happening in 2026. Both are permanent. Only one of them was built to be a destination rather than a stop along the way.
That's the thing worth knowing if you live near either project: Macomb Township isn't drifting toward one identity right now. It's placing two very different bets on what growth looks like, at the same time, a few miles apart, and residents on 23 Mile Road are going to be living with the results of both.
If you're curious how growth like this, on either end of the township, tends to show up in what a street or a corner is actually worth, that's the kind of question Joan Schinderle King fields regularly from neighbors who aren't planning a move but like knowing what's changing around them. Reach out anytime you want a straight answer grounded in what's actually happening on the ground here, not a national trend report.
