If you live anywhere near Club Boulevard, you've probably heard by now: Target is coming to the old Northgate Mall site. Neighbors are texting it around. The local newsletters ran it. Someone posted the rendering on the Walltown listserv within hours.
Here's the part almost nobody is saying out loud: that Target news covers roughly one-third of the property. The other two-thirds, including the parcel Duke University still owns from the old Macy's, has no announced plan at all. And the reason the Target-anchored third is moving forward while the rest sits still comes down to a zoning technicality that explains a lot about how this whole saga has played out since the mall went dark in 2020.
What's actually happening on the Regency third
The developer behind the Target news is Regency Centers, a Florida-based firm with other projects in the region including Village District in Raleigh. Regency is buying about a third of the Northgate property from Northwood Investors, the company that has owned the mall since 2018, and rebranding that portion Ellerbe Square.
The site plan Regency filed with the city calls for demolishing most of the old mall, the shuttered Stadium 10 movie theater, and a parking deck along Gregson Street. In their place: a roughly 140,000-square-foot building sized for a big-box anchor, five smaller buildings ranging from about 3,000 to 20,000 square feet for retail and restaurants, and somewhere around 760 surface parking spaces. Target confirmed in March that it plans to be that anchor, telling reporters it's excited to bring its stores to more Durham shoppers, though the company hasn't given a construction or opening timeline.
Regency has said it hopes to close on the purchase by late 2026. Closing on a purchase is not the same as opening a store, so if you're picturing a ribbon cutting this year or next, that's getting ahead of where things actually stand.
Why this third didn't need the neighborhood's sign-off
Here's the mechanism that explains the disconnect between what residents fought for and what's actually getting built.
Back when Northwood still controlled the whole property, the Walltown Community Association spent more than a year working with city planning staff on what's called a small area plan, a document laying out a community vision for the site: affordable housing, less surface parking, real walking paths, green space. Durham City Council passed that plan. It calls for exactly the kind of mixed-use, walkable redevelopment that turned Northgate's rivals like Southpoint into a draw decades ago.
But Regency's current site plan fits under Durham's existing zoning rules, which means the small area plan's vision, non-binding by design, doesn't legally apply to it. No rezoning required means no additional public hearing requirement forcing Regency back to the negotiating table. City Councilman Nate Baker called the resulting plan disappointing, describing it as auto-centric and inconsistent with what the community had asked for. Mayor Leonardo Williams, meanwhile, has taken the more pragmatic view, arguing that a well-known retailer draws other retail with it and that the area has sat underused for too long to hold out for a perfect outcome.
Both of those things can be true at once. That's the tension running under every version of this story you'll read.
The two-thirds nobody's talking about
Northwood Investors still owns the largest remaining share of the original mall footprint. At various points Northwood has floated other concepts for its portion, including an earlier idea to convert space into a life sciences campus, though nothing on that piece has moved to a formal proposal the way Regency's has.
Separately, Duke University owns the parcel where Macy's used to sit, a holdover from when Duke purchased that specific building back in 2017. There's no public timeline for what happens to it.
That means the actual fight over density, housing, and walkability, the fight the Walltown Community Association organized around for years, is still open on the two-thirds of the site that isn't Ellerbe Square. If you care about what eventually replaces the rest of the mall, that's the portion to keep watching, not the part with the Target logo already picked out.
What's already under construction, a few blocks over
While the mall itself sits in limbo, ground has already broken on an adjacent parcel. A Charlotte-based developer, The Spectrum Cos., is building Vara Trinity Park, a 267-unit apartment community across three buildings at 1618 North Duke Street, with entrances on both Duke Street and Club Boulevard. Plans submitted to the city show 374 parking spaces, and roughly 20 percent of the units are set aside for residents earning 60 percent or less of the area median income, developed in partnership with the Durham Housing Authority.
That project isn't part of Ellerbe Square. It's not part of Northwood's or Duke's remaining parcels either. But it sits close enough to the old mall that it's already changing the texture of the corner, and it's worth knowing it's moving forward on its own timeline, independent of whatever happens with Target.
What the neighborhood is actually saying
Reaction on the ground has been mixed in a way that tracks with how long this has dragged on. One longtime resident and former mall employee, Clayborne Flowers, has talked about how many people in the area depended on Northgate for jobs and community space before it closed. Another resident, Shea Ramirez, put the frustration bluntly, saying the mall closed five going on six years ago and that it's past time for developers, the city, and the community to stop circling and actually build something.
"Stop playing patty cake with the property and people's lives in their community and begin to create a plan and make it happen."
Not everyone is unhappy about the retail-first direction. Some residents are simply glad to see any national retailer committing to the corner after years of an empty, fenced-off lot. Others, including some who work in real estate locally, have pointed out that a big-box anchor alone won't solve the area's longer-running concerns, and that new development tends to succeed only when it's paired with sustained investment in the surrounding blocks.
What this actually means if you live nearby
For now, the practical picture looks like this. The mall building itself, the old Stadium 10 theater, and the Gregson Street parking deck are slated for demolition once Regency's purchase closes, expected late this year at the earliest. What replaces that footprint will be retail-first: a Target-anchored center with a handful of smaller shop and restaurant spaces, built around surface parking rather than the walkable design the small area plan called for. Meanwhile, Vara Trinity Park's apartments are already under construction independent of any of that, and the fate of Northwood's remaining share, plus Duke's old Macy's parcel, is still unwritten.
If you've been assuming the whole Northgate site got settled the day the Target headline broke, it's worth separating out what's actually locked in from what's still very much up for debate. The corner is changing. It's just changing in pieces, on different timelines, under different rules, and not all of it in the direction the neighborhood spent years asking for.
If you're curious how any of this might eventually touch home values or rental demand in Trinity Park, Walltown, Duke Park, or Old West Durham, that's exactly the kind of hyperlocal question Live Raleigh likes to dig into with clients who live in these neighborhoods every day. Reach out any time you want a second set of eyes on what's happening around you.
