Grandville's Next New Homes Aren't Coming From the Mall
September 10, 2026
September 10, 2026
Ask around Grandville about where the next wave of new construction is headed, and you'll likely hear something about RiverTown Crossings. The mall changed owners at the end of August 2024, and the new owner talked openly about adding housing to the property. That conversation has circulated ever since, shaping how some buyers think about Grandville's future inventory.
Here's the problem: just over two years later, none of it has become housing. Every announced addition to RiverTown Crossings since the ownership change has been retail or restaurant space. Meanwhile, a genuinely active new-construction site has been building homes in the same corridor the entire time, and it rarely comes up in the conversation.
If you're comparing Grandville to other West Michigan suburbs and factoring in "upcoming housing supply," you need to know which story is actually true.
Poag Development Group, a Memphis-based developer, bought RiverTown Crossings from Brookfield Properties on August 30, 2024. In the announcement that followed, CEO Josh Poag told Crain's Grand Rapids Business that the company intended to "densify the site some," pointing to retail, hotel, or multifamily residential as possibilities. The comment made sense on paper. Malls built in the late 1990s carry parking standards designed for a different retail era, and RiverTown sits on a sea of surface lots that a Grand Rapids commercial real estate adviser later described as the most valuable part of the whole property.
That framing is why "housing at the mall" became the shorthand version of the story. But Poag's language was conditional from the start. He was describing options under consideration, not a commitment. The redevelopment work that followed makes the distinction clear.
Since the acquisition, here's what has actually landed at RiverTown Crossings:
That's a full construction calendar. It is also, notably, zero housing units. Every completed and announced project has been retail, dining, or entertainment. The freed-up acreage from the parking deck demolition has two parcels earmarked for future tenants, and as of this writing no residential plan has been filed for either one.
None of this makes the earlier housing conversation dishonest. It makes it premature. If a buyer is weighing Grandville against, say, Hudsonville or Byron Center partly on the assumption that mall-adjacent apartments or condos are coming soon, that assumption currently has no project behind it.
While the mall conversation stayed theoretical, an unrelated builder kept adding real units to Grandville's supply, just off Ivanrest Avenue between 52nd Street and 44th Street.
The Rivertown Park community has grown in phases over several years. Earlier sections, including the Meadows and Ravines, brought ranch-style and daylight-basement condos to a wooded, hilltop parcel with amenities like a pool, fitness center, and walking paths. The newest phase, the Highlands at Rivertown Park, is a 34-unit townhome community built by Interra Homes. Units there fall within the Grandville Public Schools boundary, which covers young kindergarten through 12th grade along with preschool and community education programs. One listing for a unit in this phase put its estimated completion at July or August of 2026, which means those homes finished construction over the summer, just ahead of this writing, not years down the road. The builder's own marketing has described the phase as selling ahead of its internal pace, with homes moving before construction even began.
This is the part of Grandville's new-construction picture that a buyer comparing suburbs actually needs: it's real, it just finished, and it's condo and townhome product, not detached single-family homes with a private yard.
The distinction between speculative mall housing and completed Rivertown Park units matters more once you look at how tight Grandville's resale market already is. Over the three months ending in May 2026, Grandville's median sale price ran about $340,000, up 3.0 percent from the same period a year earlier, with homes selling after roughly 8 days on market, about the same pace as the prior year. Price per square foot moved up faster than the headline number, rising 8.8 percent year over year to roughly $215 over that same window. Zillow's home value index for Grandville, updated through June 2026, put the typical home value at $338,101, up 1.8 percent year over year, with homes going to pending in around 7 days.
Those are the numbers of a market with very little slack. A city selling homes in about a week has almost no cushion for absorbing new demand without prices moving. That's exactly why the mall housing narrative took hold so easily: buyers hunting for relief in a tight market want to believe more supply is coming, and a redevelopment announcement is an easy place to pin that hope. The actual relief valve, modest as it is, has been condo and townhome infill like Rivertown Park, quietly adding units in a form that doesn't always show up when someone pictures "new construction in Grandville."
If new construction availability is part of your decision between Grandville and its neighbors, here's the practical takeaway. Grandville's current construction pipeline runs through condo and townhome product on infill parcels like Rivertown Park, not through large detached-home subdivisions and not through the mall property. If you want a new build with a private yard, your search in Grandville right now is narrower than the mall headlines suggest. If a townhome or condo fits your plans, the Highlands phase and its predecessor sections are a real, currently active option inside the Grandville school boundary.
And if you're specifically waiting on the mall to add housing before you commit to the area, understand that as of this writing, that plan exists only as a stated possibility from 2024, not as a filed project. The two open parcels from the parking deck demolition remain the most likely place it could eventually happen, but nothing has been announced for them.
For more on how the RiverTown Crossings redevelopment has reshaped the surrounding corridor, including the restaurant openings that followed the ownership change, see our earlier look at what's happening along Rivertown Parkway. And if you want to see how Grandville's price trends and inventory compare to other communities on your list, our Grandville neighborhood page is a good place to start.
Is there still new construction available in Grandville right now? Yes, primarily in condo and townhome form through the Rivertown Park community's current phase. Detached single-family new construction within the city itself is limited compared to more land-rich neighboring suburbs.
Will RiverTown Crossings ever add housing? It's possible. The parking deck demolition freed two parcels facing Rivertown Parkway that remain unassigned, and residential was one of the uses Poag Development mentioned as a possibility in 2024. No residential plan has been filed for those parcels as of this writing.
Does the Macy's closure affect the housing conversation? Not directly. The former Macy's building is owned and managed separately from the rest of the mall, so its future is a separate decision from whatever Poag Development eventually does with its own parcels.
If you're trying to sort out what's actually available in Grandville versus what's still just a possibility, or how that compares to what you'd find in Hudsonville, Zeeland, or elsewhere in West Michigan, Lindsey Eppink can walk through the current inventory with you. Let's Connect.
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