On the last Sunday in August, a few dozen people filed into Burks United Methodist Church for the third community meeting in three months about the future of Northgate Mall. The session had a name, "Get Your Voice Heard," and it followed the same format as the two before it: a June town hall at the Hixson Community Center, a July gathering out at Valleybrook Golf Club. Residents talked about what they wanted to see. More green space. A walkable layout instead of another sealed box. A mix of retail and restaurants instead of another anchor tenant that might leave in five years. Some people wanted housing on the site. Others showed up specifically to say they didn't.
Three meetings in, and the mall still looks exactly like it did in June. That's not a failure of the process. It's the process working as designed, because the thing that has to happen before any of those wish-list items can happen isn't glamorous enough to put on a rendering. It's underground.
Why a Shopping Mall Owns Its Own Sewer System
Northgate opened in March 1972, back when the land it sits on was still outside Chattanooga's city limits. Because municipal sewer service wasn't available to the site at the time, the mall's original developers built and maintained a private system of their own. Over the following five decades, that system grew to serve dozens of businesses along what's now called Northgate Loop, not just the mall itself.
That system is failing. City officials have said plainly that replacing it is the necessary first step before CBL Properties, the mall's current owner, can move forward with anything else. This is why the redevelopment conversation Hixson has been having all year is really two separate conversations happening at the same time: a public one about parks and retail and housing, and a much less visible one about pipe replacement that has to finish first.
The financing for that first step is already locked in. The Chattanooga City Council approved a $15 million tax increment financing package last December, with $8.7 million earmarked specifically for infrastructure construction. Under the deal, CBL pays for the sewer and utility upgrades upfront and gets reimbursed over twenty years through future increases in property and sales tax revenue generated at the mall. A city Industrial Development Board vote in March confirmed the arrangement was moving forward, though it came with a brief scramble over whether one company tied to the deal was in good standing with the state. That got sorted out. The financing held.
What CBL Has Actually Committed To
Here's where it's worth being precise, because the coverage of this project has sometimes blurred plans with promises. CBL representatives have said they're interested in eventually demolishing most of the mall's interior and rebuilding an open-air, mixed-use town center, similar in concept to Cambridge Square in Ooltewah. They've floated the idea of housing as part of that mix. They've acknowledged that a relocated Hixson branch library could fit into the footprint.
None of that is committed. A CBL spokesperson told local reporters this year, in essentially those words, that the company isn't proposing anything specific and isn't ruling anything out either. The company's own estimate, given at a Friends of Hixson meeting last fall, put full interior demolition somewhere between three and six years out. That's not a delay tactic. It's a company being honest that a master-planned town center takes longer to design, permit, and lease than a sewer line takes to trench.
In the meantime, a few anchors have already been confirmed to stay put no matter what the eventual site plan looks like:
- Belk
- Old Navy
- Ulta Beauty
- BJ's Wholesale Club
- Culver's
- The former JCPenney building, which remains vacant but standing
That BJ's location is itself a useful data point. It opened January 30 this year in a brand-new 99,000-square-foot building that replaced the old Sears, a project announced back in September 2024, well before any of this year's visioning sessions started. It's proof that individual pieces of the site can and do change on their own timeline. It's also proof that the piece everyone's actually asking about, the interior overhaul that turns Northgate into something closer to a town square, is still waiting on the ground beneath it.
The One Fight That's Actually Live
If there's a genuine point of tension in this process right now, it's housing. The month after the TIF deal passed, the council debated a separate resolution meant to put the community's preferences in writing, things like a minimum acreage of green space, without legally binding CBL to them. One version called for two acres of green space specifically. The alternate version was vaguer, calling simply for "a park." Council members were candid that this language carries no real teeth. CBL still owns the property. CBL is not required to follow the resolution's suggestions.
That ambiguity is exactly why residents keep showing up. At one of this year's sessions, at least one attendee raised concerns specifically about multifamily housing going into the mall's parking lot, worried it would change the character of the area. Others at the same meetings have said the opposite, that housing built well could be the thing that finally gives Northgate the daytime and evening foot traffic a mall alone can't sustain anymore. Both sides are talking about the same acreage. Neither has an answer yet, because CBL hasn't committed to a plan that would settle it.
What to Actually Watch For This Year
If you drive Northgate Loop looking for signs of change, look down, not up. The visible work over the next year or two is far more likely to be utility crews and trench plates than storefront buildout. That's consistent with what CBL has told the city: the utility project is expected to start within the next two years, and nothing structural to the retail experience follows until that's finished.
A separate piece of the funding puzzle has also come up in these meetings: a proposed 1.125% local option sales tax that would apply to most businesses along Northgate Loop, meant to help bridge the gap between what the TIF covers and what full redevelopment will eventually cost. That proposal hasn't been finalized. It's worth knowing it's on the table, because it would touch the businesses Hixson residents already shop at long before any new construction breaks ground.
Friends of Hixson, the community group organizing these visioning sessions, has said it plans to keep holding them as the project moves through its planning phases. If you want a direct line into what's actually being discussed, rather than what gets summarized secondhand, that's the group to follow at FriendsofHixson.org.
The Read for Anyone Who Shops There
None of this means Northgate is stuck. It means the mall is doing something that doesn't photograph well: fixing the thing underneath it that made everything above it possible in the first place. The town center, the housing debate, the library relocation, all of that is real conversation happening in real rooms with real names attached to it. But the honest timeline, by CBL's own estimate, puts the visible transformation somewhere in the back half of this decade. Until then, the mall you drive past today, Belk and BJ's and a still-empty JCPenney box, is the mall you'll be driving past for a while yet.
If you're watching Hixson for reasons beyond where you shop, whether you're weighing a move here or just trying to understand how a project like this affects property and daily life along Northgate Loop, The Robinson Team has been following Hixson closely for a long time. Reach out anytime you want a straight read on what's actually happening in this corner of Chattanooga.
