Incoming tenants begin build-outs as Green Acres Mall redevelopment progresses

Some tenants headed to Green Acres Mall have started putting the finishing touches on their spaces to ready them for 2026 openings at the redeveloped Valley Stream property, an executive with the mall's ownership company said. 

“We’ve done the majority of our work and now it’s up to them to complete theirs,” said Richard Madramuthu, vice president of leasing for The Macerich Co., the Santa Monica, California-based real estate investment trust that owns the mall.

The redevelopment, estimated to cost between $130 million and $150 million, is aimed at refreshing the nearly 70-year-old, “tired mall” and taking it in a more upscale direction, he has said.

Most of the new tenants are expected to open by Black Friday next year, but the incoming ShopRite supermarket should open by fall 2027, he said.

Demolition work began in May and was completed in October as part of the project, first announced in January 2024, that will include 370,000 square feet of new development on the northeast side of Green Acres Mall, Madramuthu said.

In addition to building a new freestanding, full-service ShopRite and creating an open-air shopping streetscape with the former Kohl’s space, the project included the demolition of the vacant Sears and Sears Auto stores.

The changes also include the addition of more entertainment venues and restaurants at the Sunrise Highway mall.

New tenants coming to the mall include The Cheesecake Factory, Shake Shack, Paris Baguette, Tony’s Tacos, Panda Express, Dave’s Hot Chicken and Sephora. All of them will have sidewalk entrances and face Sunrise Highway.

Those new tenants will be in a section of the mall that was formerly Kohl’s and some smaller stores. That section is approximately 40,000 square feet, of which 7,000 remains to be leased, Madramuthu said.

The mall redevelopment also includes two entertainment venues. Launch Family Entertainment, a 34,181-square-foot facility under construction on the second floor, will have bowling, trampolines, an arcade, a ninja warrior course and food. It will sit across from a 10,000-square-foot entertainment venue that will be opening on the same floor.

An interior section of the mall on the ground level has spaces for 10 new apparel, footwear and accessories tenants, but leases haven’t been signed for that 40,000-square-foot section yet, he said. 

Macerich is still doing the renovation work on that interior section and expects to turn the spaces over to tenants in February 2026, he said.

The signed leases with The Cheesecake Factory and other incoming businesses have generated more interest from other prospective mall tenants, which is helping to diversify the tenant mix, Madramuthu said.

“We’re trying to include a little bit of everything — national flair, local flair,” he said.

Green Acres Mall was built in 1956 and bought by Macerich in 2013. Its largest tenants are Macy’s, Primark, Uniqlo, H&M and Old Navy.

In 2016, Macerich built an adjacent shopping center, Green Acres Commons, whose tenants include BJ’s Restaurant & Brewhouse, Ulta, 24 Hour Fitness, Dick’s Sporting Goods, HomeGoods and Aldi.

The mall and shopping center total 2.06 million square feet on a 100-acre campus.

'Two kinds of malls'

High-end malls, such as Roosevelt Field in Uniondale, are performing well nationwide.

But mid-tier properties like Green Acres are facing more challenges because they are older, have more vacancies due to online retail competition and draw less foot traffic, which means that they can’t charge as much rent as they’d like, said David Caputo, data scientist at Moody’s Analytics, a financial intelligence provider in Manhattan.

"It's like the story of two kinds of malls," he said.

Moody’s data shows that the national average vacancy rate for malls in the second quarter of this year was 12.20%, the highest since at least 2000, when Moody’s started tracking the data.

For comparison, the average mall vacancy rate was 11.50% in the second quarter of 2024 and 7.90% in the second quarter of 2015, according to Moody’s.

Landlords across the country are revamping enclosed malls as open-air shopping centers, residential developments, mixed-use projects and other more profitable uses.

Some malls that are being completely or partially redeveloped are bringing in more experiential tenants, such as gyms, arcades and rock-climbing centers, instead of stores, which are more susceptible to competition from online retailers.

“What retailers want to do is they want to Amazon-proof their facilities,” Caputo said.

On Long Island, two struggling malls are being redeveloped as open-air shopping centers — the former Broadway Commons, a Hicksville mall that was renamed The Shops on Broadway last year, and the former Sun Vet Mall, a Holbrook property that was renamed The Shops at SunVet in 2023. 

In Massapequa, the nearly vacant Sunrise Mall was approved for a subdivision in May to allow a sale of a portion of the land to Amazon.

The Nassau County Planning Commission approved a request by the mall's owner to subdivide about 67 acres of the 77-acre mall site to allow a sale of 26.7 acres to Amazon, which, according to the mall's owner, Sunrise Mall Holdings LLC, was under contract to buy the land.

Seattle-based Amazon said it wanted to open an operations facility on the property.

After the sale, Sunrise Mall Holdings was to retain a 32.3-acre portion of the property for future redevelopment that would occur after knocking down the mall, but "it could be years before a demolition of the mall occurs," an attorney for the company told the planning commission in May.

It was unclear Monday what the status of the property sale was.

Amazon and Sunrise Mall Holdings declined to comment. 

Nassau County spokesman Chris Boyle did not respond to requests for comment Friday or Monday.