Northgate Mall Redevelopment in Hixson: What’s Changed

Pull into the Northgate Mall parking lot on a Saturday this month and you will see two different malls sitting on the same piece of land. On one side, a brand new BJ's Wholesale Club with cart corrals still shiny and a parking lot that fills up by ten in the morning. On the other, the old JCPenney wing, empty windows, doors that have not opened in years. Same property. Same address on Hamill Road. Two completely different timelines.

That split is the part of the Northgate story that keeps getting lost. Every few months there is a new headline about Hixson's mall getting a makeover, a rendering, a meeting, a vote. What the coverage rarely spells out is that some of this has already happened and locked into place, while the rest is still sitting on a drawing board that will not move for years. If you live near Highway 153, knowing which is which changes how you read every future update.

The Half That Already Changed

Northgate Mall opened in 1972 as the second enclosed mall in Chattanooga. Sears anchored one end for decades until it closed and sat vacant. That building came down, and on January 30, 2026, BJ's Wholesale Club opened in its place, a 99,000-square-foot store that is the first of its kind in the region. Belk, Old Navy, Ulta and Culver's are all still open and operating as they were before any of this began. The former JCPenney building is still standing but empty.

That part of the story is finished. No community meeting, no rendering, no future vote changes any of it. If you are wondering what Northgate looks like right now, that is your answer: one new anchor, several familiar ones, and one empty box waiting on the rest of the plan.

The Half That's Still a Rendering

The bigger transformation, the one that gets called a "town center" in almost every headline, has not started. CBL Properties, which has owned the mall since 2011, has said its plan is to demolish most of the interior mall structure and rebuild the site as an open-air, mixed-use center. In November 2025, CBL told residents at a Friends of Hixson meeting that full demolition of the existing mall was still three to six years away. A company representative told residents again in July 2026 that construction on the actual town square is not expected to break ground until 2028.

That is a long runway, and there are already guardrails on what gets built once it starts. In January 2026, the Chattanooga City Council passed a resolution urging that no more than 25 percent of new construction on the site be residential, with a stated preference for individually owned condominiums over rental units. The same resolution asked CBL to cooperate with the city to reserve space for a new library branch somewhere within the redeveloped footprint. None of that is built yet. All of it is still negotiation.

Why the Sewer Had to Come Before the Storefronts

Here is the detail that explains why this has taken so long and will keep taking a while longer. Northgate was built in the early 1970s, before Hixson was annexed into the city of Chattanooga. Because city sewer service was not available at the time, the mall's original developers built and maintained a private sewer system that still serves dozens of businesses on the site today. That system is now roughly fifty years old and failing, and city officials have said replacing it is a required first step before any new construction can happen, town center or otherwise.

That is what the tax increment financing deal you may have seen in the news is actually paying for. The city approved a $15 million TIF arrangement, with $8.7 million earmarked specifically for replacing the water, sewer and stormwater infrastructure. CBL pays for the work up front and gets reimbursed over time through the extra property and sales tax revenue the redeveloped site is expected to generate. In plain terms, the public money on the table right now is buying new pipes, not new storefronts. The storefronts come later, once the ground underneath them can support them.

The Model Everyone Keeps Bringing Up

Ask around at any of the community meetings and you will hear the same comparison over and over. Both city officials and residents have repeatedly pointed to Cambridge Square in Ooltewah as the kind of development they want to see at Northgate: a mix of housing, retail, entertainment and public green space built at a walkable scale rather than the enclosed, single-use mall format Northgate has been since 1972. Nobody has promised Northgate will look like that. It is simply the reference point people keep reaching for when they try to describe what they are hoping the site eventually becomes.

Not Everybody Is Cheering

The tone at these meetings is not universally hopeful. When the city council debated the resolution in January 2026, Dana Chadwell, owner of the Chattanooga Yarn Company, a small business inside the mall, put her frustration on the record. She said small business owners at Northgate are consistently the last to learn about CBL's plans and argued the council's language offered no real guarantee that the redevelopment would protect existing merchants rather than simply hand tax dollars to a large property owner.

That skepticism sits alongside more optimistic voices from the same rooms. A CBL representative speaking at the July meeting described the eventual goal as a place where people can gather, walk and eat, and said residents from both Hixson and greater Chattanooga would likely be excited about the outcome. Both things can be true at once. The infrastructure is real and underway. Whether the finished product actually serves the small businesses currently operating there is still an open question, and it is one only time and the details of future leases will answer.

The One Date That Actually Matters This Month

If you want a hand in shaping the parts of this project that are not yet decided, this is the moment. Friends of Hixson is hosting its third community visioning session on the Northgate redevelopment on Sunday, August 30, at 2 p.m. at Burks United Methodist Church. The session is themed "Get Your Voice Heard" and builds on two earlier gatherings, including a July meeting at Valleybrook Golf Club where residents pushed for expanded retail and entertainment options, more park and green space, and better pedestrian access across the site. The meeting is free and open to anyone in the community.

What gets discussed at meetings like this one genuinely feeds into design decisions still being made about green space, gathering areas and the overall character of the site. What it will not change is the sewer replacement already underway, the anchors already confirmed, or the fact that this remains a multi-year build. Knowing that difference is the whole point of showing up with realistic expectations instead of waiting for a town square that is still years from breaking ground.

Northgate is not going to feel dramatically different by this time next year. It is going to feel exactly the way it does right now: one new store, a handful of familiar ones, an empty JCPenney, and a much bigger plan quietly working through infrastructure, financing and design meetings in the background. If you have opinions about what that bigger plan should look like, Sunday afternoon at Burks United Methodist Church is where those opinions currently have somewhere to go.

Deonne Taylor keeps an eye on changes like this because they shape what it means to live in Hixson day to day, not just what a house might be worth. If you are curious how projects like the Northgate redevelopment could affect your own corner of the neighborhood down the road, or you just want to talk through what your home looks like in today's market, Deonne Taylor Homes is always glad to connect. Let's connect, get your free home valuation, and talk about what's next for your street.