A few years into the long saga of Northbrook Court's redevelopment, a handful of neighbors south of the mall did something that changed the shape of the project. They told the village that an 80-foot apartment building planned for the site's southwest corner would tower over their backyards, cut their privacy, and depress their property values. The developer moved the building 27 feet farther from the property line and agreed to build a berm to soften the sightline. It was a small concession in engineering terms and a significant one in what it revealed: proximity to this site has never been a simple plus for the homes around it. It has been a negotiation.
That negotiation is still running, and it matters more now than it did then, because the project has quietly reversed its own stated order of operations. Northbrook Court was pitched to the village as a retail and dining destination first, with housing woven in to support it. What is actually under construction, or about to be, is the opposite: apartments, row houses, and townhomes are coming first, and the shops that were supposed to anchor the whole vision are being pushed to a later phase with no fixed date.
The sequence nobody marketed
Brookfield Properties has owned Northbrook Court, at 1515 Lake Cook Road, since 1995. For most of that ownership the mall functioned as a conventional shopping center. That changed as national retail softened and the property's vacancy climbed, and in 2023 the village approved a comprehensive Economic Incentive Agreement built around a roughly $98 million package of tax increment financing and sales tax rebates, tied to a redevelopment Brookfield by then estimated would cost about $750 million. The plan on paper still read the way it always had: a mixed-use neighborhood with retail as its commercial anchor.
In 2025, Brookfield asked the village for something different. Instead of leading with retail construction, the company wanted to build the residential component first and requested that the village amend the incentive agreement to allow it. Trustees agreed. Northbrook Village President Kathryn Ciesla explained the guardrail the village built into that approval:
"The agreement protects taxpayers by requiring 50% of retail to be leased before incentives are accessed."
That single sentence is the whole mechanism. Brookfield does not get its tax increment financing or sales tax rebates released until half of the retail space is actually leased. Retail leasing in a struggling regional mall, in a high interest rate environment, is slow and expensive to pre-fund. Apartment construction, by contrast, has been easier to finance and faster to lease against demonstrated suburban multifamily demand. So the developer is doing the part of the project that pencils out on its own, and holding off on the part that only pencils out once the incentive money unlocks it. The order that looks backward from the street is, from a balance sheet, the only order that made sense to build first.
A timeline worth tracking, not memorizing
| When | What happened |
|---|---|
| 2018–2019 | Early concept pegged the project at roughly $250 million, with Brookfield seeking about $27 million in incentives |
| October 2023 | Village approves a $98 million incentive package; total project cost by then estimated near $750 million |
| March 2025 | Trustees amend the agreement to let Brookfield build residential ahead of retail |
| December 2025 | Village's own project page describes the two sides as still in "regular discussions," with no construction confirmed |
| Summer 2026 | Industry reporting had flagged this as the earliest realistic construction start |
That last line is worth sitting with. Summer 2026 has already come and gone as of this writing, and the most recent public status update we could find, the village's own December 2025 note that talks were ongoing, predates it. A projected start date has quietly slipped past without a published update confirming ground was broken. This is a project whose earlier public-private partnership, struck in 2019 for about 18 acres of the site, never materialized because of the pandemic. A buyer weighing a home near Lake Cook Road today should treat every projected date the way you'd treat a builder's estimated close date on new construction: directionally useful, and, in this case, already once overtaken by the calendar.
What's actually open right now
While the phases get sorted out, Northbrook Court has not closed. Roughly two dozen stores and restaurants remain in operation, including Chanel, White House Black Market, The Lego Store, and Chico's. Neiman Marcus, the mall's last remaining anchor, has said publicly it does not plan to leave. If you're touring homes nearby and picturing the mall as a construction site you'll drive past for a few years, that's the more accurate mental image than an empty lot. It's a partially open retail center with a residential project rising somewhere on its parking lots, on a timeline the village itself hasn't nailed down.
The number that explains why the village said yes
Northbrook Court has long been the village's single largest taxpayer. Village officials said at a 2019 board meeting that the property was providing more than $2.5 million a year in property tax to School District 28 alone, plus about a quarter of the village's total sales tax revenue. Those figures predate the pandemic-era vacancies and the newer incentive agreement, but they explain why the village has kept negotiating with Brookfield instead of walking away from a struggling mall. That context matters for reading the incentive agreement correctly. The village isn't subsidizing a developer's preference out of generosity. It's protecting a revenue base that funds local schools and services, and the 50-percent-leased trigger is the mechanism it built to make sure Brookfield delivers the retail piece rather than banking the incentives and walking away once the housing is done.
What this means if you're comparing homes near the site
If you're looking at a home within walking distance of Northbrook Court, three things are worth separating in your head, because portals and listing copy tend to blur them into one impression:
- The amenity you're buying today is the retail that's currently open, not the retail that's promised. Chanel and Neiman Marcus are real reasons to value a walkable location right now. A future food hall or restaurant row is not yet a fact you can price against.
- The construction exposure is closer, and less certain, than a five-year plan implies. A project that stalled once already, whose own village page described talks as still ongoing in December 2025, and whose earlier summer 2026 construction target has passed without a public confirmation, deserves the same skepticism you'd apply to any phased development without a hard completion date.
- Proximity has already produced one documented negotiation over height, setback, and privacy. If a home you're considering sits along that southwest edge, or any edge facing the residential construction, it's reasonable to ask what setback and screening commitments apply to the parcel nearest that property, not just to the site plan as a whole.
None of this means the location is a bad bet. A completed mixed-use project, with new housing stock and eventual retail refresh, tends to be a long-run positive for the surrounding streets. It means the value of "near Northbrook Court" is not fixed yet, and a buyer who prices it as if the destination retail already exists is paying for a future that hasn't been built, on a schedule the village itself won't commit to.
A few questions worth asking directly
Before you write an offer on a home near the site, it's worth asking your agent, or the village directly, a short list of specific questions: What is the current, most recent status of construction permits for the residential phase? Which parcels have documented setback or berm commitments tied to the 2019-era neighbor negotiations, and do those commitments carry forward to the current plan? And has any portion of the 50-percent retail leasing threshold been met, which would tell you how close the incentive money, and the retail phase it unlocks, actually is.
The village's own development pages are the most reliable place to check status, since they're updated as agreements change rather than written once and left to age.
Quick answers
Is Northbrook Court still open for shopping today? Yes. About two dozen tenants remain, including Chanel, White House Black Market, The Lego Store, and Chico's, and Neiman Marcus has said it intends to stay.
Will homes near Northbrook Court gain value once the redevelopment is finished? A completed mixed-use project with new retail and dining typically supports nearby values over time, but that outcome depends on the retail phase actually being built, and the retail phase is contractually tied to leasing benchmarks that haven't been reported as met.
How do I find the most current status of the project? The Village of Northbrook maintains an official redevelopment page that is updated as the agreement and timeline change, which is a more current source than a listing description or a general search result.
If you're weighing a home near a site like this one, the difference between a good decision and a costly one usually comes down to which facts are current and which are aspirational. That's the kind of read The Dickstein Group does for every North Shore client, house by house and parcel line by parcel line. Request a private consultation and we'll walk the specifics of the address you have in mind.
