Green Acres Isn't the Only Thing Being Rebuilt in Valley Stream Right Now

Drive past Green Acres Mall this month and you'll see chain-link fencing where Sears used to be, a parking garage half torn down, and storefronts with paper over the glass. If you didn't know better, you'd guess the mall was dying. You'd be wrong, and the reason why says more about how Valley Stream is changing than any single store opening could.

What's actually happening is two separate renovations running on two separate budgets, on two pieces of ground that sit closer together than most residents realize. One is Macerich's roughly $400 million private overhaul of the mall itself. The other is a $10 million public grant aimed at the Village of Valley Stream's downtown, a few blocks away near the LIRR station. Neither project answers to the other. Both are betting on the same idea: that the future of this town runs through places you can walk to, not just drive to.

The Anchor That Isn't There Yet

The construction fencing exists because the site's next anchor tenant isn't a store you shop in occasionally, it's one you'd visit every week. Macerich signed ShopRite to an 80,000-square-foot lease back in January 2024, and the plan has always been to build that grocery store where Sears used to stand. Sears closed in 2021 after nearly four decades at Green Acres, and its demolition, along with the adjacent parking garage and auto center, kicked off the construction phase in the summer of 2025. The full build-out is projected to run through 2026 and wrap in 2027, which is also when ShopRite is expected to open.

Terry Glass, co-CEO of Glass Gardens, the family-owned operator behind ShopRite, said the company was looking forward to "providing a full-service supermarket experience to the greater Valley Stream community." That's a notable shift for a mall that spent seventy years anchored by department stores. Gimbels opened it in 1956. Korvettes, Gertz, Stern's, and eventually Kohl's all cycled through that same footprint over the decades, and Kohl's closing in 2019 left the space sitting empty for years. Swapping a vacant department store for a grocery anchor is a bet that people want reasons to come back weekly, not seasonally.

What's Already Open While You Wait

Not everything is behind fencing. AKIRA, the Chicago-based women's fashion retailer, opened at Green Acres in November 2025 ahead of the holiday season. JD Sports is open. Foot Locker got a redesign that now includes an interactive Kids Foot Locker. Those openings happened quietly, without the fanfare of the bigger names still to come, which is worth noticing if you've assumed nothing new has actually landed yet.

Here's where things stand as of this month, based on the mall's own announcements:

Look at that list closely and the pattern is dining, not clothing. Of the fourteen names on it, nine are restaurants or food concepts. That's not an accident.

The Kings Plaza Comparison

When Macerich announced the redevelopment, senior vice president Eric Bunyan pointed to the company's Kings Plaza property in Brooklyn as the template, where a former Sears space was reconfigured with new tenants that combined were expected to generate eight times the annual sales of the previous use. That's the number that explains the fencing. A single department store doing modest volume gets replaced by a cluster of restaurants and specialty retail each pulling their own traffic, and the sum ends up worth far more per square foot than the store it replaced.

Assemblywoman Michaelle Solages, who has represented the area through the whole cycle of demolition and rebuilding, put it simply when the project hit its demolition milestone: "For nearly seven decades, this mall has been part of Valley Stream's story and has played a key role in the memories of our locals." The redevelopment isn't erasing that history so much as betting that a mall built for one kind of shopping trip in 1956 needs to become something else to matter in 2027.

The Second Renovation Isn't at the Mall at All

Here's the part that's easy to miss if you only follow mall news. In May, Governor Hochul announced the Village of Valley Stream would receive $10 million from the state's Downtown Revitalization Initiative, the Long Island winner for that funding round. The money isn't going toward Green Acres. It's earmarked for the Rockaway Avenue corridor and the area around the train station, aimed at what Assemblywoman Solages called a more "walkable, connected" downtown. Assemblywoman Judy Griffin called it "a game-changer for this over 100 year old village."

The distinction matters more than it sounds. Green Acres Mall itself sits in the unincorporated hamlet of South Valley Stream, in the Town of Hempstead, not inside the incorporated Village of Valley Stream. Only a sliver of the mall's parking lot and a few north-side stores actually fall within Village limits. So the DRI grant and the mall redevelopment are legally and financially unconnected projects, run by different governments and funded by entirely different sources, private REIT capital in one case and a state grant in the other. But they're aimed at the same resident, and arguably the same outcome: fewer trips that require getting in a car to run one errand, more of a downtown and a retail campus you can treat as an extension of your own block.

The Small Store That Confirms the Bigger Bet

If you want proof that investors think this appetite is real even before the big anchor arrives, look at the smallest name on this list, not the biggest. On August 18, the Hempstead Industrial Development Agency approved a lease bringing Miniso, the Guangzhou-based retailer known for home goods, plushies, and "blind box" collectibles, to a 7,200-square-foot space in Green Acres Commons. It would be the first Miniso location anywhere on Long Island. Green Acres Commons is the open-air power center next door to the enclosed mall, home to BJ's Restaurant & Brewhouse, Ulta, and Dick's Sporting Goods since it opened in 2016, and it's a separate leasing decision from anything happening inside the mall itself. The lease still needs to be executed and no opening date has been set, but the fact that a global retailer picked this specific stretch of Sunrise Highway for its Long Island debut, in the middle of a construction zone, tells you something about how the corridor is being read by people who study foot traffic for a living.

What to Actually Expect if You Live Nearby

If you're doing your weekly grocery run, ShopRite isn't open yet and isn't expected until 2027, so nothing changes there in the near term. The mall has stayed open throughout construction, so the stores that are trading now, including the ones on this list, are accessible without detours. Expect the fencing and partial demolition to be part of the drive past Sunrise Highway for at least another year, with new names filling in gradually rather than all at once, the way AKIRA and JD Sports already have. And if a global retailer with real estate data at its disposal is willing to bet on a storefront in Green Acres Commons before the anchor project even finishes, that's a reasonable signal that whatever this corridor becomes next, it isn't going to look like a mall in decline.

Valley Stream is worth watching closely right now, not because the median home price moved this quarter, but because two unrelated investors, a national grocery cooperative and a state government, independently decided this particular stretch of Nassau County is worth their money at the same time. That kind of overlap doesn't happen by accident, and it's the kind of detail Yadlynd Cherubin and The Legacy Team pay attention to when they talk with buyers, sellers, and neighbors about what's actually happening on the ground here, not just what a listing sheet says. If you're curious how any of this connects to your own corner of Valley Stream, schedule a free consultation and let's talk about it.