"I'm giddy-up, let's go," Plan Commissioner Keri Halperin said at an August 2023 joint public hearing, as the village board and plan commission worked through the zoning application that would let Brookfield Properties remake Northbrook Court. The room had reason for enthusiasm. Brookfield was describing a $750 million transformation of the mall's roughly 100 acres off Lake Cook Road: new outdoor shops and restaurants, a mixed-use residential neighborhood with as many as 2,000 homes, and an end to two decades of watching anchor stores disappear one by one.
Three years later, the giddy-up hasn't arrived. If you've driven past Northbrook Court recently, you already know this. The parking lots look the same. The gates are still down on the same empty storefronts. What's changed isn't the property. It's the paperwork, and the paperwork explains why nothing visible has happened yet.
Three Years of "Soon"
The public record on this project is unusually well documented, because every step required a village board vote. Laid out in order, the timeline reads less like a construction schedule and more like a series of postponements:
- April 2023: Brookfield presents its conceptual master plan to the village board, pricing the full redevelopment at $750 million.
- May 2023: The village and Brookfield sign a non-binding pre-development agreement.
- June through August 2023: Zoning review, a tax increment financing study, and public hearings on a new business district designation.
- October 30, 2023: The village board approves a Redevelopment and Economic Incentive Agreement, the legal foundation for everything since.
- Early 2025: Apple closes its Northbrook Court store, citing the mall's shifting redevelopment plans. Lululemon, Forever 21, Auntie Anne's, and Sephora also close out their leases.
- March 2025: Brookfield asks the village to let it build the residential piece before touching retail. Trustees agree.
- Early 2026: A survey of the property finds it looking essentially the same as it did when the plan was announced. The earliest realistic groundbreaking for housing is now summer 2026.
That's three years between a headline-grabbing announcement and a groundbreaking that still hadn't happened as this was written. For a project this large, some delay is normal. But the gap here isn't just slow permitting. It's built into how the deal was structured.
What the Fine Print Actually Does
Here's the detail that explains the stall better than any single headline. When Kathryn Ciesla, Northbrook's village president, described the incentive agreement in 2025, she put it plainly: the deal "protects taxpayers by requiring 50% of retail to be leased before incentives are accessed."
Read that again from Brookfield's side of the table. The public money, the tax increment financing and sales tax rebates the village approved to help pay for construction, doesn't become available until half the retail space is under lease. But retail is the hard half to lease right now. High interest rates and a difficult retail-financing environment made regional mall construction a tough sell in 2023 and have only gotten tougher since. Apartments, by contrast, have been easier to finance and have posted strong rent growth across the Chicago suburbs.
So the sequence flipped. Instead of building the shops that unlock the incentive money, Brookfield asked to build the housing first, essentially betting that new rooftops on the property will eventually make the retail easier to fill, and that the incentive money can wait until leasing conditions catch up. It's a logical move for a developer managing a difficult retail market. It also means the thing residents actually notice, new stores and restaurants opening, is the piece being deferred the longest.
The Mall as It Stands Today
Northbrook Court's own website still advertises "more than 90 specialty stores." A commercial real estate database that tracks shopping center tenants counted 24 active brands there as of April 2026. That gap between the marketing copy and the tenant roster is the clearest single number in this story.
What's still open: Neiman Marcus, the original 1976 anchor and the only one of the mall's founding department stores never to leave. Tiffany & Co., Tommy Bahama, Chanel, White House Black Market, The Lego Store, and Chico's round out the retail side. California Pizza Kitchen and Di Pescara still draw lunch crowds. Freestanding Crate & Barrel and Arhaus locations sit at the property's edges. The AMC theater is still running, and two Hi-Five Sports Zone locations still book kids' sports camps and birthday parties.
What's gone in just the past two years: Apple, Lululemon, Forever 21, Auntie Anne's, and Sephora all closed out their Northbrook Court leases. That's on top of the longer arc, Sears left in 1983, I. Magnin closed in 1991, and Macy's, the mall's last non-Neiman department store anchor, shut down and was demolished in 2019.
Neiman Marcus, for its part, told reporters it has no plans to leave, calling the upcoming changes an opportunity to "reinvigorate this area." It's the one piece of continuity in an otherwise thinning tenant list.
This Isn't Even the First Attempt
If the current stall feels familiar, it should. This isn't Northbrook's first swing at redeveloping this property. Back in 2019, the village and Brookfield struck an earlier public-private partnership covering about 18 acres of the site. That effort never materialized. The COVID-19 pandemic arrived within months and the plans quietly died.
The 2023 plan is a much bigger swing at the same problem, more than five times the acreage of the 2019 attempt, with a price tag three times the size of Brookfield's original 2018-era ask. It's also, so far, following a similar pattern: public announcement, public enthusiasm, and a long stretch where nothing on the ground actually moves. The difference this time is that a piece of the project, the residential phase, now has a real state approval and a real timeline, even if that timeline keeps sliding.
What Could Actually Change in the Next Year
Design materials from Omniplan, the architecture firm attached to the residential phase, describe a first build of 315 apartments overlooking a new landscaped lawn, with parking for 434 cars tucked underneath. That's a fraction of the up to 2,000 residences Brookfield originally floated for the full ten-year build-out, and a much smaller number than the 12-story towers an early zoning exhibit once suggested might be possible on parts of the site. What gets built first, in other words, is a modest opening chapter, not the whole book.
Summer 2026 was the earliest the village had indicated construction could realistically start on that first phase, and summer 2026 is, as of this writing, nearly over. The most recent public update on file, from December 2025, still described the village and Brookfield as being in regular discussions rather than under active construction. Given the project's track record so far, from a 2019 partnership that evaporated to a 2023 plan that's taken three years to reach a shovel, a missed summer window would fit the pattern more than it would break it.
What isn't in question is the shorter-term picture. The tenant list will likely keep thinning before it grows again. Neiman Marcus, California Pizza Kitchen, Di Pescara, and the handful of specialty stores still holding leases are the mall's anchor for now, and the interesting local news over the next year may end up happening around Northbrook Court rather than inside it, in the restaurants and storefronts opening along Skokie Boulevard, Dundee Road, and Willow Road while the mall itself works through its long, slow second act.
For residents who remember Northbrook Court as the place they saw a movie in eighth grade or shopped for a first job interview suit, the honest answer to "what's happening to the mall" is that the paperwork is finished and the concrete hasn't started. That's not a knock on the plan. It's just where things stand, three years and two failed public-private attempts into a project that was always going to take longer than one village board meeting suggested.
If you're keeping an eye on how Northbrook's neighborhoods are changing, from what's happening at the mall down the road to what's actually moving in the surrounding housing market, Audra Casey tracks it as part of the monthly Northbrook Market Report. It's a good way to stay current on the village without waiting for the next groundbreaking announcement to find out what's really going on.
