We bought a mall.
And we didn’t just buy a mall, we bought one that nobody else wanted to buy.
Global Mall at the Crossings — formerly Hickory Hollow — had been a mess for a decade before Mayor John Cooper’s surprise announcement in March 2022 that the city was spending $44 million for the property.
Largely empty, Global Mall at the Crossings was in 2022 partially a Southeast campus of Nashville State and partially a time capsule of shopping habits from an earlier time. Retail had fled the site years before. Cooper administration staff describe a deal that came together quickly. Presented with a fleeting option to acquire the adjacent Bridgestone Americas property that closed in 2020 along with the rest of the mall, Vanderbilt University Medical Center was brought in as a partner. The idea was to replicate the success VUMC had at revitalizing 100 Oaks and Cooper announced that the medical center signed a letter of intent to lease 600,000 square feet of space.
And then nothing happened.
Vanderbilt and Cooper could never agree on terms. The property has issues — the main building needs a new roof, stormwater costs are not small and someone will have to pay for a parking deck to accommodate all of the site’s eventual needs — and Cooper was pushing a much higher rent than Vanderbilt would ever accept. When VUMC started facing other economic challenges, the deal was an easy one to walk away from.
“Time kills all deals,” said one former Cooper staffer this week.
So now, we own a mall.
Joy Styles scrunches up her face when you say those words to her. She’s been the Metro Council representative for District 32, which includes the property, since 2019. Turning the former Hickory Hollow into a community hub is one of her highest priorities. She sees this as the next Crosstown Concourse, a 10-story former Sears building in Memphis that’s been transformed into a mix of market-rate housing, artist housing, retail, arts space, nonprofit offices and more.
“It is a brilliant structure,” she says of Crosstown Concourse. She wants Antioch to become an arts hub, noting it’s one of the last places in Davidson County that’s affordable, and whatever the mall becomes could be the center of it. Truth be told, she’s not sorry to see a deal where Vanderbilt would have taken most of the space fall apart, even if the agreement would have made more economic sense.
“It was never for me about Vanderbilt getting all of this,” Styles says. “And in fact, our conversations were around, ‘OK, how much do they really need?’ … They don’t need all 600,000 [square feet]. Let’s figure out how much they really need, and how much we keep for ourselves, because we have community needs out here.” She says conversations continue with Vanderbilt about a smaller piece of the property.
What about affordable housing? Given the skyrocketing cost of living in Nashville, wouldn’t turning the area into …
“NOPE,” she says before the question is even finished. “Because Antioch is already chock full. I have plenty of apartment buildings. What I need is a place for community. I don’t want to hear about what the whole city wants for my district. I want to know what my community wants for our district.” She says that this site is not the place to try solving the city’s affordable housing problems. “There are other parts of town,” she says. “Good luck to you. I’m sure those councilmembers will love to have you. Not here. No ma’am.”
Styles has a refreshing surety about her. However, this surety has also gotten her sideways with both the last administration and this one over a number of issues. For instance, she opposed former councilmember Jeff Syracuse’s appointment to the Music, Film, and Entertainment Commission, and the two feuded for years, while on the Metro Council together, on how to build the body and make it effective. The bluntness that makes her an effective spokesperson for her issues can also burn through political capital. And she’s going to need the O’Connell administration for the next step.
She is pushing for the city to issue a request for proposal (RFP) from master developers to transform the mall property. This would be a much smaller deal, but similar to what the city signed with the Fallon Company to develop the East Bank. There’s a lot happening around the campus right now, with KIPP putting in a high school and the adjacent Ford Ice Center drawing roughly a million people a year. But it’s going to take the force of a developer to turn the property into anything resembling what Styles wants.
The city is more likely to proceed with a request for information first. An RFI is basically the city asking the market to tell them what they think Metro should cover in infrastructure costs. That will inform how the city approaches any RFP.
“We’re sure that a developer would ask the city for infrastructure investment,” says Bob Mendes, Metro’s chief development officer. “And because of that, we’re being cautious before we proceed.”
The city has already sunk $44 million into the property, so getting the RFP right is vital not only for what Styles wants for Antioch, but for the county’s taxpayers as a whole. The site is immensely important as a WeGo hub, both now and as part of any transit system improvements. The library and community center adjacent to the mall are some of Metro’s most utilized facilities.
Ask Styles what she thinks it’s going to cost in order to turn this into something resembling Crosstown Concourse or Redbird in Dallas and she smiles. She knows better than to float a number that people will latch onto. For her, it’s time the city had a conversation about investing someplace besides downtown.
“We cannot be myopic and say we can only focus on one thing because it’s somebody’s pet project,” she says, referring to the East Bank. “We have to be equitable. And we have to continue our investments around the city, or we’re doing exactly what’s been done in the past and making people feel like their areas aren’t important enough. … We’re talking about a mall that has been blighted now for over 10 years.”
Right now, all of the city’s attention is on the East Bank and the new Titans Stadium. But at some point soon, Metro is going to have to turn its attention to the southeast.
Because we bought a mall.