Burks United Methodist Church will host its third community visioning session on the future of Northgate Mall this Sunday, August 30. It's not the first time residents have shown up to describe what they want in place of the mall's aging interior, and it won't be the last. Since March, the same conversation has moved from a golf course conference room to a community center to a golf club breakfast and now to a church fellowship hall, and the phrase that keeps surfacing across all four rooms is the same one: something like Cambridge Square.
If you've lived in Hixson through any of this, you've heard it too. Residents want a walkable center, real green space, and businesses that stay local rather than another string of national chains behind a parking lot. Ooltewah's Cambridge Square gets cited as the proof that Hamilton County can build this. What doesn't usually get said out loud at these meetings is how long Cambridge Square actually took to become the place people are pointing to. That gap between the model and its timeline is worth understanding before anyone assumes Northgate's version shows up quickly.
Four Meetings, One Recurring List
Here's the sequence so far, in case you missed one:
- March 15, 2026 – Town hall at the Greenway Farm Conference Center, hosted by Councilman Jeff Davis
- June 14, 2026 – Town hall at the Hixson Community Center, paired with a discussion of the city's next budget
- July 15, 2026 – Friends of Hixson's second visioning session, held over breakfast at Valleybrook Golf Club
- August 30, 2026 – Friends of Hixson's third visioning session, at Burks United Methodist Church, themed "Get Your Voice Heard"
Across those four rooms, the requests have held steady: expanded retail and entertainment options, dedicated park and green space, and easier pedestrian and vehicular access through the site. The city council's own resolution on the project asks CBL Properties to work toward a compact, walkable town center envisioned in Plan Chattanooga's Hixson/Red Bank Area Plan, and Councilman Davis has said the goal is to give city officials a written record of what the neighborhood actually wants before the ground gets broken, not after.
Friends of Hixson president Greg Taylor put it plainly ahead of an earlier session: the visioning series gives residents a direct role in shaping what comes next, rather than reacting to a finished plan.
What CBL Has Actually Agreed To
Strip away the wish list and here's what's locked in writing so far. The city's resolution caps new construction at the site to no more than 25 percent residential, with individually owned condominiums preferred over rentals. CBL has agreed to cooperate with the city to reserve space for a relocated Northgate branch of the Chattanooga Public Library. And several existing anchors will stay standing through the process: Belk, Old Navy, Ulta, BJ's Wholesale, Culver's, and the long vacant former JCPenney box.
None of that came free. The infrastructure work funding it runs through a tax increment financing arrangement the Chattanooga Industrial Development Board approved in March 2026, a $15 million package with roughly $9 million earmarked for construction that CBL will front and get reimbursed through future tax revenue generated at the property. The reason infrastructure has to come first isn't optional. Northgate opened in 1972 before Hixson was annexed into the city, so the mall's original developers built and maintained a private sewer system that now serves dozens of businesses that never asked to depend on it. That system is failing, and nothing else at the site moves until it's replaced.
Not every merchant on the property is convinced the process has treated them fairly. Dana Chadwell, owner of the Chattanooga Yarn Company inside the mall, said during the council debate that small business owners at Northgate are always the last to know CBL's plans. At an earlier town hall, resident Marie Chinery raised a version of the same concern about the public money involved, asking why residents should help fund the fix when nobody yet knows what they'll get back for it.
The Model Everyone Cites Took Fourteen Years
Here's the piece that tends to get skipped when Cambridge Square comes up as the template. The Ooltewah development started as a 130-plus acre buffer strip next to the Honors Course, with utility work beginning around 2011 and the first commercial phase finishing by the summer of 2013. Homes didn't start coming out of the ground until years after that. By 2018, developers had 11 residential units built with roughly 30 more planned for that year alone. By 2020, the commercial square had grown into more than two dozen restaurants, shops, and medical offices hosting weekend entertainment. In 2024, the project was still adding new tenant buildings. In February 2025, Hamilton County approved 26 more townhomes on top of the 300-plus units already built or under construction there.
That's not a project that opened as a finished town center. It's a project that has been under active construction, in phases, for close to a decade and a half, and by most accounts is still not done adding housing.
Northgate is starting from a different position, and not necessarily an easier one. Cambridge Square's developer controlled a blank parcel and could sequence commercial and residential buildout on its own schedule. Northgate is a legacy enclosed mall with a public sewer system replacement that has to happen before a single retail or residential structure gets built, funded through a public-private financing tool that itself only cleared final approval in March 2026. CBL's own senior vice president of redevelopment, Jon Meshel, told residents at the July visioning session that he expects actual construction work at the site to begin around 2028, a date that lines up with the three to six year demolition window CBL gave at the first town hall back in November 2025.
Run the math and the comparison gets clearer. If Northgate's redevelopment starts construction in 2028 and follows anything like Cambridge Square's pace, the version of Northgate that looks like what residents are describing at these meetings isn't a 2029 or 2030 story. It's a story that plays out well into the next decade, in phases, the same way Cambridge Square did.
What Changes Before Then
None of this means Northgate is standing still. BJ's Wholesale Club opened at 401 Northgate Mall Drive on January 30, 2026, a 99,000-square-foot store built on the site of the former Sears and expected to bring more than 100 jobs, the sixth BJ's location in Tennessee. It's a strange bit of timing that one of the biggest physical changes to the property in years landed before the town center vision it's supposedly part of has a design, a renderings package, or a groundbreaking date.
Day to day, the mall residents already know isn't disappearing anytime soon. Belk, Old Navy, and Ulta keep operating. The AMC Northgate 14 keeps selling tickets. The sewer and water replacement funded by the TIF is the visible work coming to the site over the next year or two, not demolition of the interior.
Sunday's session at Burks United Methodist Church is free and open to anyone who wants to weigh in on design character, gathering spaces, or what should fill the footprint once the infrastructure work clears the way. If you've been to one of the earlier meetings, or you're curious what happens when a fourteen-year build-out becomes the reference point for a neighborhood's expectations, it's worth an hour on Sunday afternoon.
If you're the kind of Hixson resident who's been tracking every one of these meetings because you care what your corner of town looks like in ten years, that instinct is exactly the kind of local read that matters when the time comes to think about property, whether that's your own home, a rental, or land nearby. Kyle Johnston and the rest of the team have been watching Hixson's changes for years, not to sell you on a moment but to help you understand what a place is actually becoming. Let's Connect whenever you're ready to talk about what any of this means for you.
