The old Boston Store at Southridge Mall closed in the summer of 2018. For years afterward, the 219,800-square-foot box sat empty behind a ring of cracked parking lot, the kind of vacant anchor every regional mall in the country has been quietly carrying since department stores stopped being department stores. By the middle of 2027, people will be living inside it.
That gap between empty and occupied is not a Greendale story, even though the mall's official address puts most of the property there. Southridge sits on the line between Greendale and Greenfield, and the master planning area for its overhaul reaches into the City of Greenfield's own parking lots on the north end. If you're comparing Greenfield to Brookfield or New Berlin right now using nothing but the median price you saw on a portal, you're missing the number that actually explains why Greenfield's market is behaving the way it is this year.
The blight designation did more work than the name suggests
In April 2021, the Village of Greendale's Community Development Authority formally designated the Boston Store parcel as blighted under Wisconsin's redevelopment statute. That is not just an unflattering label. A blight designation is what lets a municipality use tax incremental financing to make a project like this pencil out, and it is the legal hinge the entire redevelopment has swung on since.
Once that designation was in place, the village spent years lining up the rest of the deal: a redevelopment agreement in 2021, a new tax district (TID 6) created in October 2022, and a sequence of amendments that stretched into 2025. Barrett Lo Visionary Development finally closed on the property for $3.3 million in May 2026, and the project now has a name: Verdell on the Green, designed by the Chicago office of KTGY, with roughly 700 to 740 apartments and about 20,000 square feet of new retail wrapped around a public green.
The village didn't stop at one parcel. In April 2025, Greendale hired planning firm RINKA to study the entire 100-acre Southridge campus, and the resulting Emerald Reserve Master Plan was adopted by the Village Board on May 19, 2026. That plan lays out scenarios for the rest of the mall too, including one where JCPenney or Macy's eventually gets redeveloped into another 420 to 500 housing units.
Here's the timeline in order, because the sequencing matters more than any single date:
| When | What happened |
|---|---|
| 2018 | Boston Store closes; anchor sits vacant |
| April 2021 | Village of Greendale designates the 14.82-acre parcel blighted |
| October 2022 | Tax Incremental District 6 created around the site |
| June–September 2025 | Plan Commission and Village Board approve the general development plan |
| February 3, 2026 | Amended plans re-approved after revisions |
| May 1, 2026 | Barrett Lo Visionary Development closes on the parcel for $3.3 million |
| May 19, 2026 | Village Board adopts the Emerald Reserve Master Plan for the full site |
| July 16, 2026 | Court-extended deadline for the mall's separate foreclosure sale |
| Mid-2027 | First phase of Verdell on the Green expected to open |
Five years from blight designation to a signed developer. That lag is itself information for anyone weighing a neighborhood built next to a project like this: the announcement you read about years ago and the construction crew that shows up next door are rarely close together in time, and the years in between are exactly when nearby home values quietly start responding to the plan rather than the finished building.
What the price data is already showing
Greenfield's numbers moved before a single wall came down. In January 2026, the median sale price in Greenfield was $318,000, up 11.5% from the year before, and homes were selling in 44 days on average, down from 63 days the prior year. By July 2026, homes listed in Greenfield carried a median price of $332,000 at $203 per square foot, and the typical listing was under contract in just 14 days.
The January figure is the cleaner comparison, since it measures the same month a year apart instead of stacking winter against summer. Eleven fewer days on market and a double digit price gain, in a single January to January stretch, is a meaningful move for a suburb that rarely makes headlines. Wisconsin's statewide median sale price has actually drifted down slightly over the same period. Greenfield moving the other direction lines up with the window when the Southridge redevelopment stopped being a proposal on a village agenda and became a signed deal with a name and an architect attached.
None of this means the mall is single-handedly driving Greenfield's price growth. But the mechanism is worth understanding on its own terms, separate from correlation. A blighted, foreclosed anchor sitting empty for years is a drag on how appraisers and buyers perceive everything nearby, even homes a mile away that have nothing structurally to do with the mall. Removing that designation and replacing the box with people and rent checks doesn't just add housing units to the county. It removes a specific kind of downside that had been priced into the surrounding area for the better part of a decade.
What this means if you're looking at a home near the 76th Street corridor
If you're touring homes on the Greenfield side of that boundary right now, there are a few things worth asking that a portal search won't surface.
Ask how close the property actually sits to the construction footprint versus the broader master plan area. The Emerald Reserve Master Plan covers the mall campus, its parking, and a stretch of the 76th Street corridor between Grange Avenue and Martin Luther High School. A home a few blocks from that boundary will feel the multi-year construction timeline very differently than one a mile away that simply benefits from the neighborhood's improving reputation.
Ask your agent to pull the actual TID boundary before you assume anything about how this affects your tax bill. Tax incremental financing works by capturing the increased assessed value inside the district to pay down the project's costs over the TID's allowable life, which in this case runs up to 27 years. Homes outside the district aren't part of that specific mechanism, but it's worth understanding where your address falls relative to the line rather than guessing.
And if you're the one selling into this market, the current pace, homes under contract in about two weeks as of July 2026, means presentation and pricing strategy matter more than ever, not less. A tight market rewards a home that shows well and is priced to match what's actually happening on the ground, not what a stale comp from a year ago suggests.
A few questions worth asking directly
Is Southridge Mall in Greenfield or Greendale? Both, depending on which part of the property you mean. The mall's official address and most of its footprint sit in Greendale, but the master planning area for the redevelopment extends into the City of Greenfield's own parking lots on the north end of the site.
Will the new apartments raise my property taxes? Not directly, if your home sits outside the TID boundary. The tax incremental financing structure captures the increased value generated inside the district itself to pay for the project, which is a different mechanism than a general tax increase across the surrounding area.
How long will construction actually take? The first phase of Verdell on the Green is expected to open by mid-2027, but the broader Emerald Reserve Master Plan describes a multi-phase build-out that the village itself frames as evolving over years, not a single construction season.
Greenfield's market right now is doing something a headline median price can't explain on its own. If you're weighing whether now is the right time to buy or sell here, or you want a second opinion on how a specific address relates to the redevelopment boundary, Blue Violet Homes can walk through the parcel-level details with you. Request a free home valuation and we'll help you read the market the way it's actually moving, not just the way it looks from the outside.
