Drive the Northgate Loop on any weekday afternoon and the pattern is easy to read. Cars still cluster outside Belk and BJ's. The wing that used to hold the food court sits dim. Somewhere past the mostly empty JCPenney box, orange construction fencing has started to appear around utility access points, the first physical sign that something is actually happening after a year of headlines promising it.
On August 30, Friends of Hixson held its third community visioning session on the mall's future, this one at Burks United Methodist Church under the banner "Get Your Voice Heard." Three meetings in under a year is a lot of civic energy for a project that, as of that Sunday afternoon, still had no approved site plan. That gap between how much has been discussed and how little has been decided is the actual story here. Residents keep showing up to weigh in on a redevelopment that is, in the parts that matter most, still mostly undecided.
The $15 Million Isn't Paying for a New Mall
The number that gets repeated most in coverage of this project is $15 million, the tax increment financing package the Chattanooga City Council approved in December 2025. It sounds like redevelopment money. It isn't, not directly. Northgate Mall was built in the early 1970s, before the area was annexed into the city of Chattanooga, which meant its original developers had to build and maintain their own private sewer system. That system, now more than fifty years old, serves dozens of businesses along the Loop and is failing. The WDEF report from the infrastructure meeting is blunt about the sequence: replacing the water, sewer, and stormwater system is the necessary first step, and nothing else at the site can move forward until it's done.
Of the $15 million, $8.7 million is earmarked specifically for that construction. CBL Properties, the mall's owner, pays the upfront cost and gets reimbursed later through future growth in property and sales tax revenue generated at the site. At a November 2025 community meeting, city officials also floated a 1.125% local option sales tax on most Northgate Loop businesses as a way to help close the financing gap. Money moving through this deal right now is retiring infrastructure debt from the Nixon administration. It is not a down payment on the town center in the renderings.
The Proposal That Got Pulled in July 2026
For a few months, the most concrete-sounding piece of the redevelopment wasn't retail or green space. It was housing. LDG, a Louisville-based national developer active in Nashville, Atlanta, and Austin, had been in talks with CBL about building an affordable housing project on one of the mall's parking lots, aimed at households earning at or below 70% of the area median income, which the U.S. Census Bureau put at roughly $64,500 for the Chattanooga area in 2024.
On July 28, 2026, CBL asked a Chattanooga board to pull the item from its agenda entirely. A company spokesperson told the Times Free Press that CBL does not have a deal with LDG and is not pursuing one, and that those conversations had ended before the community engagement process even started. It's a useful data point for anyone trying to sort signal from noise in this project: an idea specific enough to reach a public board's agenda still evaporated in a matter of months.
What Isn't Actually Up for Debate
Amid all the talk of what could change, one part of this story has stayed fixed since the earliest coverage. CBL's plan calls for demolishing most of the mall's interior, not the whole structure. Several anchor stores are staying exactly where they are:
- Belk
- Old Navy
- Ulta
- BJ's Wholesale Club
- Culver's
- The former JCPenney building
Whatever ends up filling the middle of the property, the businesses Hixson residents already drive to are not part of the demolition plan. That's worth knowing before assuming a redevelopment announcement means your regular errands are about to move.
The Town Center Comparison Everyone Keeps Reaching For
When CBL representative Jon Meshel talks about what could replace the mall's interior, he points to a specific, already-built example: Cambridge Square in Ooltewah, the walkable mixed-use retail center about twenty minutes east. It's become the shorthand local officials and CBL both reach for when describing the "compact, walkable town center" language written into the city's own area plan for Hixson and Red Bank.
But a comparison isn't a commitment. Asked directly about housing at the site, Meshel offered one of the more candid lines to come out of this process: "Housing is a good complement to a mixed-use project." Asked what CBL was actually proposing, he was even more direct: "We're not proposing anything, and we're not not proposing anything." That is not evasive language from someone hiding a plan. It reads like a company that genuinely hasn't settled on one yet.
Two Different Processes, Landing in the Same Window
It helps to separate two things that keep getting collapsed into one in casual conversation around Hixson.
The first is the utility project, replacing the sewer, water, and stormwater lines. Meshel has said CBL still has no timeline for an overall master plan but does expect the utility work itself to begin within the next two years, which points to a start sometime around 2028.
The second is the redevelopment itself, meaning actual demolition and new construction inside the mall. Back in November 2025, CBL's own representatives estimated demolition was still three to six years away, a window that also lands somewhere between 2028 and 2031.
Read together, both markers point to roughly the same year as the earliest realistic starting line, not the sharp before-and-after the meeting recaps sometimes imply. What differs is what shows up first: pipes and trenches, then, much later if at all, an actual storefront.
What the City Tried to Lock In, and Couldn't
In January 2026, the city council passed a resolution urging the Industrial Development Board to attach specific conditions to CBL's development agreement: no more than 25% of new construction should be residential, and if housing is built, individually owned condominiums are the preferred form. The resolution also asked CBL to cooperate on reserving space for a relocated Hixson library branch within the redeveloped footprint.
It's a detailed wish list. It's also nonbinding. Councilman Jeff Davis, who sponsored it, was straightforward that the intent wasn't to impose zoning-style conditions and that CBL, as the property owner, is not required to fold any of it into its final plans. The council can express what the community wants. It cannot make CBL build it.
What to Actually Watch From Here
For residents trying to track this without wading through six months of council agendas, a few concrete markers matter more than the vision-board talk:
- Friends of Hixson continues to hold public meetings on the Northgate question as new developments warrant it, on top of its regular monthly coffee meetings.
- The Industrial Development Board's next substantive action will likely track the utility project bidding and construction timeline CBL referenced for the next two years, not a master plan.
- A public library relocation and any residential component remain floated ideas, not filed applications, until something appears on an IDB or planning commission agenda with a specific address and square footage attached.
The honest version of this story is less dramatic than "the mall is being reborn" and more useful than that headline would suggest. The infrastructure fix is real and funded. The affordable housing idea is dead. The anchor stores aren't moving. Everything else, the town center look, the library, the ratio of retail to housing, is still a conversation happening in a church fellowship hall once a month, waiting for CBL to turn a comparison into a drawing.
If you're weighing what any of this means for a specific street or a specific listing near the Loop, that's a narrower and more useful conversation than the citywide version. The Tiano Group has been tracking Hixson block by block long enough to know which changes move property conversations and which ones are still just talk. Schedule a meeting when you're ready to talk specifics.
