Northgate Mall Isn't Closing. It's Being Rebuilt One Tenant at a Time.

Drive past Northgate this month and the mall will hand you two contradictory stories in the same parking lot. Chain link now wraps the old Sears building, and the interior has been stripped down to studs since late January. Fifty yards away, the Macy's lot is full on a Saturday afternoon and RH Outlet has a new sign on a building that used to sell school clothes for Kohl's. Both scenes are true at the same time, and neither one tells you what's actually happening at Northgate right now.

The mall isn't shutting down for a few years and reopening as something new. It's swapping one tenant at a time, on a schedule that's easy to miss if you only catch the headlines. Some buildings are already gone. Some have already been refilled. One sits dark, waiting on a tenant that won't move in for another year and a half. If you live in Terra Linda or drive Northgate Drive on your way to the 101, here's what each piece of the mall actually looks like as of September 2026, and why the timeline isn't as simple as "the mall is becoming apartments."

The Building That's Actually Coming Down

Sears closed here back in 2018, and its three buildings sat mostly dormant until this year. On January 26, 2026, crews began interior work inside all three former Sears structures, stripping non-structural materials as prep for full demolition. Ghilotti Bros., the San Rafael-based contractor handling the job, gutted the structure through the following weeks, and demolition of the former Sears building got underway earlier this year.

That's the part of Northgate that's genuinely disappearing this year. The redevelopment team, Merlone Geier Partners, has been explicit that this first construction phase is contained to the southern portion of the site, around the old Sears footprint, where the plan calls for new townhomes. The rest of the mall stays open and operating while that happens. So if you've noticed fencing near the old Sears wing but nothing blocking your path to Macy's or the food court, that's by design, not an oversight.

The Retailer That Moved Sideways, Not Out

Here's the detail most people miss: RH Outlet hasn't left Northgate during any of this. It's moved twice within the same shopping center to stay open through the demolition.

RH Outlet originally occupied part of the first floor of the Sears building. When Kohl's announced its closure in January 2025 and shuttered that location in late March 2025, Merlone Geier struck a deal to move RH Outlet into the vacated Kohl's building instead of losing the tenant altogether. RH Outlet now occupies both floors of that former Kohl's space, and it's expected to keep operating there through the rest of Phase 1 and into Phase 2.

It's a small piece of the story, but it explains why the mall doesn't feel like it's hemorrhaging retail even as major anchors vanish one by one. The developer isn't just demolishing buildings and hoping tenants stick around. It's actively relocating them inside the property to buy time before the bigger construction phases start.

Where Each Anchor Actually Stands

Laid out this way, the pattern is clear. Nothing at Northgate goes from open to rubble in one step. Every building passes through a holding phase first, whether that's a lease negotiation, a permit application, or a tenant fit-out.

The Empty Building Everyone's Watching

The one that's generated the most neighborhood chatter is the old Rite Aid. It went dark sometime in 2025, and for months the freestanding building at 1500 Northgate sat with no announced plan.

That changed on February 25, 2026, when Good Earth Natural Foods announced it had signed a lease for a 21,300-square-foot store in that exact building. It'll be Good Earth's third Marin County location, with a full organic produce department, a scratch-made prepared foods section, a café pouring organic coffee and juice, and a full-service meat and seafood counter. The company says the store will bring more than 200 jobs to the area and is aiming for a spring 2027 opening.

Spring 2027 is worth sitting with for a second. Rite Aid closed in 2025. Good Earth doesn't open until roughly two years later. That's an 18-month-plus gap between one anchor going dark and its replacement opening its doors, longer than most kitchen remodels, and it's a useful reminder that a lease announcement is not a grand opening. If you're wondering why that building still looks empty from the road, this is why: permitting and tenant improvements haven't even started yet as of this writing.

What Doesn't Change While This Happens

None of this touches the restaurants that already make Terra Linda worth a stop on a weeknight, and several of them sit close enough to Northgate that you'll drive past construction fencing to get there.

• Monk's Kettle Terra Linda on Del Ganado Road, the same team behind the original San Francisco gastropub, still pours Pliny the Elder alongside burgers and pub food kitty-corner from the Terra Linda Pool.
• Panchito's, a family-run Mexican spot that's been serving North San Rafael for years, keeps its lunch and dinner hours unchanged.
• La Toscana, an Italian restaurant the Mori family opened in 1985 near the Civic Center, is still run day to day with a menu built around the same recipes that got it started nearly four decades ago.
• Redwood Cafe on Paul Drive remains the low-key breakfast and lunch spot locals point newcomers toward.

None of these businesses sit inside the construction perimeter, and none of them depend on Northgate's retail lineup to draw a crowd. That's worth knowing if the fencing and dust make you assume the whole area is in flux. The parts of Terra Linda that have nothing to do with the mall redevelopment are carrying on exactly as they were.

The Town Square Nobody's Built Yet

The eventual plan is bigger than any single tenant swap. The City of San Rafael approved key entitlements for the full Northgate Town Square project on December 2, 2024, and the buildout calls for up to 1,422 residences across two phases, an open-air town square close to 60,000 square feet, a relocated public library with meeting space, and a direct pedestrian connection to the SMART Marin Civic Center station.

One detail changed late in the process that's easy to miss if you only saw the original 2021 filing: that early plan had zero ownership units, just apartments. After pushback from neighbors who wanted lower-density product along the property's southern edge, the developer added 138 for-sale townhomes to the current plan. So if you've assumed everything coming to Northgate will be a rental, that's no longer accurate for at least a slice of it.

Phase 1 alone brings 864 of the total residential units plus the town square and its planned dog park, playground, and flex space for events like food truck nights. Phase 2, which would bring another 558 units and could eventually include the Macy's and RH Outlet footprints if those leases aren't renewed, doesn't have a confirmed start date in current public materials.

What This Means for Your Next Trip to Northgate

If you're navigating this mostly by what you see from the car, here's the short version. The Sears buildings are actively being demolished, and that construction zone is limited to the southern part of the property. RH Outlet isn't gone, it just moved into the old Kohl's space and stayed open. Rite Aid's building is spoken for but won't reopen as Good Earth until spring 2027 at the earliest. Century Theatres remains the one open question with no public tenant news yet. And everything outside that construction perimeter, including the restaurants that make Terra Linda worth the drive on a Tuesday night, is running on its normal schedule.

The mall isn't disappearing this year. It's being disassembled one building at a time, on a timeline that will stretch well past 2027, and knowing which building is in which stage tells you a lot more than assuming the whole property is one demolition project.

If you're curious how changes like this ripple into home values and buyer interest in Terra Linda and the rest of San Rafael, that's exactly the kind of hyperlocal detail Team O'Brien - David & Deirdre tracks block by block. Reach out for a free home valuation or a conversation about what's actually happening in your corner of Marin.