Northbrook Court Redevelopment: Why Groundbreaking Has Yet to Begin

"Giddy-up, let's go."

That was Northbrook Plan Commissioner Keri Halperin in August 2023, closing out the meeting where the village cleared the path for Brookfield Properties to remake the 100-acre Northbrook Court site. The board approved the full redevelopment and economic incentive agreement two months later, on October 30, 2023. Village President Kathryn Ciesla called it a generational opportunity. The plan on the table was a $750 million overhaul: an outdoor retail and dining destination on the northeast side, apartments and townhomes to the west, a Great Lawn where Macy's used to stand.

Three years later, if you drive past on Lake Cook Road, the mall looks almost exactly like it did the day that meeting happened.

The Plan Flipped Before It Started

The original sequencing had retail leading. Brookfield's 2023 conceptual plan called for a new open-air shopping and dining corridor first, with the housing component following in phases. That order didn't survive contact with 2025's lending market.

In March 2025, the village approved special permits letting Brookfield build the residential portion first, ahead of any retail construction. Ciesla explained the developer had asked to move housing up because it "gives the developer the opportunity to better respond to current market conditions and build momentum for the overall redevelopment." The logic tracked: apartment financing was easier to secure than retail construction loans, and suburban multifamily was pulling in stronger rent growth than anything a half-vacant mall could promise a retail tenant.

The earliest possible groundbreaking for that housing phase, according to reporting at the time, was summer 2026.

Summer 2026 has come and gone. As of the village's own project page, the most recent update on file is from December 2025, and it says only that Northbrook "continues to have regular discussions with the Northbrook Court property owner regarding the future redevelopment of the property." A mall directory tracking service that updated its Northbrook Court records this September still lists the same roughly twenty tenants anchored by Neiman Marcus, with no indication that ground has broken on anything.

What's Actually Still There

The tenant list has been shrinking since 2019, when Macy's announced it would close as part of a 13-store national cut. That anchor building came down not long after. Lord & Taylor liquidated everything in August 2020 as part of its bankruptcy. A discount retailer called Shopper's Find took the space briefly in 2021 and was gone within a year. H&M's two-story store, open since 2011, closed in January 2022.

The bigger wave came in 2025. Apple closed a location that had been there for roughly two decades. Lululemon, Sephora, Forever 21, Auntie Anne's and Louis Vuitton all followed within months of each other.

What's left is smaller but not empty:

Neiman Marcus put out its own statement last year after closure rumors circulated, saying it has "no plans to close" and calling its Northbrook store a fixture of the community for nearly 50 years. That commitment matters more than it might elsewhere, since Neiman Marcus is the only original 1976 anchor still standing.

How the Incentive Structure Works

The village restructured the deal so that TIF funds and sales tax rebates for the retail portion only activate once retail leasing hits a specific threshold. Ciesla put it plainly when the change went through: "The agreement protects taxpayers by requiring 50% of retail to be leased before incentives are accessed."

That protects the village's tax base from subsidizing empty storefronts. The 50% leasing threshold ties access to retail incentives to tenant commitments. The housing-first pivot placed the residential phase ahead of retail construction, without requiring retail commitments first. So far, construction on that phase has not visibly started.

Brookfield had earlier sought around $27 million in village subsidies, split roughly between tax-increment financing and sales tax rebates, tied to an initial retail phase estimated at $250 million. Those figures predate the housing-first pivot and the full $750 million plan, and outline the public support requested for the earlier retail phase.

Activity Around the Mall

Nearby, Northbrook's restaurant scene has continued to change. Just Salad opened its Willow Road location in April 2026, marking the chain's tenth Illinois store and its first to serve Northbrook and neighboring Glenview directly. A little over a year earlier, Buffalo Wild Wings GO held its grand-opening ribbon cutting at a new Dundee Road location, complete with a $500 donation to Glenbrook North High School athletics.

None of that activity is happening inside Northbrook Court. It's happening around it, on the same commercial strips, while construction at the mall has yet to begin.

Northbrook Court's Film History

Northbrook Court opened March 17, 1976, and it picked up a couple of film credits along the way that a lot of longtime residents still bring up. John Hughes grew up in Northbrook and went to Glenbrook North High School, and when he needed a mall for 1985's "Weird Science," he shot it here, along the stretch that now holds California Pizza Kitchen. Five years before that, Robert Redford's "Ordinary People" used the mall too. Mary Tyler Moore's character shops at Neiman Marcus and rides the escalator in a scene that lasts about thirty seconds. The film went on to win four Academy Awards.

Whatever comes next for the property, it's already spent fifty years as more than a shopping center for the people who grew up walking through it.

What You Can See This Fall

Nothing about a groundbreaking. Neiman Marcus says it has no plans to close. The sit-down restaurants that survived, California Pizza Kitchen, Di Pescara and P.F. Chang's, are still drawing lunch crowds. The AMC theater is still running its full schedule, and Hi-Five Sports Zone is still holding camps and classes for kids as young as two. The rest of the mall is quieter than a two-level regional center was built to be, with visible gaps where recognizable names used to sit.

The housing phase that was supposed to be the fast-moving part of this plan hasn't broken ground as of this writing. The retail phase behind it remains tied to a leasing benchmark. For now, the most accurate way to describe Northbrook Court is the same way the village describes it: a property still in regular discussions, not yet in construction.

If you're watching Northbrook's commercial corridors change and want a read on how a specific project, block, or listing fits into that picture, Haylee Stone tracks these shifts as they happen and is glad to walk through what it means for your particular street or building.