Mall at Green Hills Renovation 2026: What’s Changed So Far

"It's a nightmare. It's really bad."

That's how one Green Hills shopper described the parking situation at the mall this summer, months after Simon Property Group unveiled a $250 million redevelopment plan for the property. If you live near Abbott Martin Road and have followed the headlines since February, you'd be forgiven for picturing scaffolding, torn-up entrances, maybe a temporary detour or two. Walk through the mall today and you'll find almost none of that. What you will find is a run of new storefronts, a general manager who still won't name a start date, and a parking argument that reveals more about how the mall actually works than any press release has.

The announcement was big. The visible changes are small.

In February, Simon confirmed it had taken full control of The Mall at Green Hills after buying out its former partner, Taubman, and laid out plans for what it called a complete transformation: two-story flagship entrances, "jewel-box" spaces built for luxury boutiques, new landscaping, and upscale finishes meant to cement the property as the region's top retail destination. Simon's leadership framed it as the same playbook the company used on Southdale Center in Minneapolis, a full exterior and interior overhaul rather than a cosmetic refresh.

Seven months later, the exterior looks the same. What's actually shifted is happening inside, one storefront at a time. Christian Louboutin opened on the upper level next to Nordstrom. SKIMS and Swatch are both slated for the lower level, also next to Nordstrom, though neither had opened as of the most recent local tenant update in early August. Altar'd State is relocating across the hall from its current spot near Macy's, staying open through the move. Journey is shifting to a new spot outside Dillard's. Dolce & Gabbana joined the roster as well.

None of that is nothing. But none of it is the two-story entrance or the reimagined arrival experience Simon described in February either. If you've been waiting to see the "complete transformation" take shape, what you're actually watching is a tenant reshuffle, the kind malls do every year, running in parallel with a much larger project that hasn't broken ground.

Nobody will say when construction starts

This is the part that seems to be catching residents off guard. Simon's February release said construction was "expected to begin in 2026," which sounded like a near-term commitment at the time. By June, local reporters pressed mall general manager Norah Buikstra for specifics on timing and got a non-answer: no confirmed start date, no detail on how the work would affect parking, just "more to come." Simon's corporate side didn't add anything more specific either, repeating only that construction would begin sometime this year.

That was three months ago. With four months left in 2026 and no groundbreaking reported since, the gap between the announcement and the ground truth is starting to look less like early-stage planning and more like a project still waiting on permits, contractors, or both. If you're the kind of shopper who plans around construction detours, there's nothing to plan around yet. That's worth knowing before you assume a facade project is imminent just because a press release said "this year."

The parking numbers don't match what people are describing

Here's where the story gets more interesting than a simple construction delay. Simon's own marketing for the property advertises more than 4,300 self-parking spaces, a number that sounds like plenty for a mall with roughly 130 stores and restaurants. But when reporters asked Buikstra directly about the parking complaints, she offered a detail that explains the disconnect: about 70 percent of that total sits inside the mall's parking decks, not in surface lots.

That's the mechanism nobody's spelling out in the marketing copy. The mall isn't short on spaces. It's short on people willing to use the ones that require driving into a deck instead of circling for a surface spot near an entrance they know. Shoppers like Molly Milam and Carissa Schmidt describing the lot as impossible aren't wrong about their own experience, but they're also describing behavior, not scarcity. Most of the capacity exists. It's just structured in a way that a habit-driven surface-lot shopper never encounters.

That distinction matters if you're weighing whether the $250 million project will actually fix anything. A facade redesign with grander entrances doesn't add a single new parking space. If the redevelopment doesn't also change how people find and use the decks already built, the complaint that's dogging this project right now will still be the complaint people are making after the ribbon-cutting.

What's changed versus what hasn't, side by side

What this actually means if you shop here regularly

If your routine already includes the mall, the honest read is this: nothing about your day-to-day visit is likely to change in the immediate term. The new stores are worth a look if you've been curious about Louboutin or waiting on SKIMS, and the Altar'd State and Journey moves are minor enough that you might not notice unless you're looking for a specific storefront that's moved a few doors down. The bigger project everyone read about in February is still a plan on paper, not a site under construction.

The parking situation is the one place where a small habit change might actually help more than waiting on Simon's timeline. If the surface lots near your usual entrance are full, the decks aren't a last resort, they're most of the mall's actual capacity. That's not a workaround, it's how the building was designed to be used.

Green Hills has always worked because it's dense with things people actually visit on a regular Tuesday, not just a shopping list. The Bluebird Cafe is a few minutes away, Hill Center still runs its own separate mix of boutiques and restaurants, and none of that rhythm depends on whether Simon breaks ground this fall or next spring. The mall is one piece of the neighborhood, not the whole of it, and right now it's changing more slowly, and more quietly, than the announcement made it sound.

If you're weighing a move to Green Hills or thinking about what a property near this kind of redevelopment means for your own plans, that's a longer conversation, and one Jessica Cassalia is glad to have. Reach out for a free home valuation or a conversation about what's actually happening in this market, informed by the kind of local detail that doesn't show up in a press release.