In June 2025, a man named Kenny Custer stood in front of the East Ridge City Council representing developer Bob Martino, the owner of the Chattanooga Red Wolves and the force behind the 110-acre Gateway development next to the team's CHI Memorial Stadium. He wasn't there to celebrate. He was there to ask the city to rezone ten acres of the project so his client could build something smaller and more conventional: 68 detached single-family homes, on land that had originally been slated for up to 300 more stacked townhomes.
The council approved it 4-1. If you're comparing East Ridge to other Chattanooga-area suburbs right now, that vote matters more than almost any price you'll find on a national listing site, because it tells you what actually happened to the project everyone points to when they call East Ridge "up and coming."
What the Renderings Promised
The Gateway's stadium and surrounding site broke ground in 2021, announced as a $125 million mixed-use development anchored by what was billed as Tennessee's first professional soccer stadium. The pitch was ambitious: townhomes, shops, offices, restaurants, and a hotel, all within walking distance of match day. Early commercial commitments included Top Golf, Champy's Chicken, and Jonathan's Grill, and in 2022 the developer broke ground on the project's first residential phase, 144 planned townhome units, alongside its first commercial building, a whiskey bar and live music venue called Nooga Live. A February 2024 rendering still promised a resident pool and poolhouse for the townhome community.
That kind of announcement tends to reshape how a market gets talked about. Once a project promises a live-here-play-here district next to a stadium, it becomes the reference point for every conversation about the neighborhood's direction, even for buyers who have no interest in living in a townhome at all.
What Actually Got Built
By April 2025, nearly three years after the residential phase broke ground, only 12 of the planned 144 townhomes had been constructed. Two were occupied. That figure comes directly from Times Free Press reporting on the rezoning request, and it's the clearest available signal of how the attached, stadium-adjacent product actually performed once it hit the market.
The developer's response wasn't to slow down and wait for demand to catch up. It was to change the product. The rezoning request gave the city two options for the ten acres in question: up to 300 more townhomes, or 68 detached single-family homes. The council's final vote in June 2025 went with the single-family option.
Read that sequence in order and it says something the marketing never did. A developer who had already committed to a stacked, walkable housing model looked at nearly three years of real sales data next to his own stadium and pivoted to yards and driveways instead of doubling down. That's not a rendering. That's a builder responding to what buyers in this specific market were actually willing to pay for. As of this writing, no public update has surfaced on how much of that single-family phase has broken ground, so treat the 68-home approval as the latest confirmed step rather than a finished project.
Why the Median Price You See Doesn't Mean Much Here
If you've searched East Ridge home prices on more than one site, you've probably noticed the numbers don't agree with each other. One national aggregator put East Ridge's median sale price at $288,777 in May 2026, up five percent from a year earlier. A different one, sampling August 2026, showed a median asking price of $262,000, down more than 30 percent from the same month in 2025. Those aren't rounding differences. They're two snapshots of a market small enough that a handful of closings can swing the headline number in opposite directions within the same summer.
Part of that instability traces directly back to the Gateway. When a market this size occasionally closes a new-construction townhome next to a stadium and other months closes only older single-family resale homes, the "median" bounces around based on which type of house happened to sell, not on any real shift in what East Ridge property is worth. One property-listing site tracking East Ridge townhomes specifically in October 2025 showed just two units on the market, with a reported median price near $390,000, a figure completely disconnected from the rest of the neighborhood's housing stock.
That disconnect matters because East Ridge's actual housing stock, outside the Gateway footprint, looks nothing like the townhomes at the center of the story. Recent multiple listing data puts the average East Ridge home at roughly 1,460 square feet, well under the Hamilton County average of 2,158. This is still, fundamentally, a market of smaller and older homes. A handful of new units next to a soccer stadium doesn't change that math. It just makes the aggregate numbers noisy enough that they stop being useful without local context.
The Other Redevelopment, Which Isn't About Housing at All
There's a second East Ridge project that gets casually lumped in with the Gateway conversation, and it's worth separating the two. In late 2023, Chattanooga-based developer Urban Story Ventures bought the old Osborne Shopping Center, a 13-acre, 160,000-square-foot property on Ringgold Road that includes a long-vacant former Food City. Company president Jimmy White described the plan as turning the site into a mixed-use hub with retail, medical office space, restaurants, and bars, and the city approved development incentives for the project, now referred to as the East Ridge Shopping Center, in December 2024.
Part of that plan involves converting a stretch of Old Ringgold Road behind the buildings into a pedestrian promenade for food trucks and weekend vendors, a change the city has publicly framed as restoring what locals call "Tennessee's First Shopping Center." This is a retail and amenity project, not a housing supply story. It won't add inventory for a buyer comparing East Ridge to Hixson or East Brainerd. What it will do, if it moves forward on the timeline the city and developer have described, is change what's within walking distance of whatever house someone ends up buying nearby. That's a different kind of value than a new subdivision, and it's worth keeping the two projects separate in your head rather than folding them into one generic "East Ridge is changing" narrative.
What the Existing Stock Tells You
None of this touches the part of East Ridge that isn't waiting on a rezoning vote or a construction schedule. Camp Jordan Park, a 275-acre facility with 13 diamond fields, 14 rectangular fields, a two-mile walking track, an 18-hole disc golf course, and a fishing pond, has been drawing regional sports tourism and daily foot traffic for years, independent of anything happening at the stadium two miles away. Neighborhoods near the park, including the established Hummingbird Village area, sell on that proximity today, not on a future promenade or a still-underbuilt townhome cluster.
For a buyer weighing East Ridge against other Chattanooga-area suburbs, that's the more reliable comparison point. The Gateway and the East Ridge Shopping Center are both real, both funded, and both worth watching. But the homes that will actually be available to buy in the next twelve months are overwhelmingly the older, smaller stock that's been there for decades, priced and sold the way that stock has always been priced and sold, not the renderings from a groundbreaking ceremony five years ago.
A Few Questions Worth Asking Before You Compare East Ridge to Anywhere Else
Is the Gateway's residential build-out finished? No. As of the most recent public reporting, the city had approved zoning for 68 single-family homes on part of the site, but there's no confirmed timeline for when those will be built or listed.
Does the slow townhome absorption mean East Ridge home values are falling? Not necessarily. It means the new-construction product at the Gateway underperformed relative to its own announced timeline. The existing housing stock elsewhere in East Ridge is a separate market with its own pricing pattern, and conflating the two is exactly what produces the wildly different median prices you'll see across different listing sites.
Should I wait for the Gateway or the shopping center redevelopment to finish before buying in East Ridge? That depends entirely on what you're looking for and your own timeline, and it's not something a blog post can answer for you. If proximity to either project matters to your decision, it's worth walking the actual site and talking through current timelines with someone who tracks East Ridge closings regularly, rather than relying on a rendering from a groundbreaking that happened years ago.
If you're trying to figure out what East Ridge actually offers right now, versus what it's been promised for years, that's a conversation worth having with someone who watches these filings and closings as they happen. Kyle Johnston Homes works across East Ridge and the surrounding East Tennessee communities every day, and we're glad to walk through what's real, what's pending, and what fits your search. Let's Connect.
