What's Opening at Memorial City This Fall? Greenside's New Tenants
October 1, 2026
October 1, 2026
The demolition of the former Sears building back in 2020 left this wing of Memorial City Mall "unleasable to area retailers," as MetroNational's vice president of communications told the Houston Chronicle. That leasing history explains the construction fencing near the old Sears entrance this year. The demolition crews are working on the wing left behind when the Sears building came down, and the mall's department-store anchors are not part of this phase.
Meanwhile, just north across I-10, a very different kind of construction has been finishing up. Greenside, the wellness and dining development tucked behind Kirby Ice House, Mia's Table, and Torchy's Tacos on Gessner Road, announced in mid-June that it had leased all but 3,500 square feet of its 35,000-square-foot footprint. Ten businesses, most opening between this summer and the end of the year.
Put those two facts next to each other and you get the real story of Memorial City in 2026. One part of the district is reworking a section of the mall that has been unavailable to retailers since 2020. Another part, barely on your radar until recently, is adding businesses faster than most people can keep track of. Neither move is really about the mall building itself. Both are about what MetroNational, the family-owned company that has run this corner of west Houston since 1954, has decided the neighborhood actually wants to do with its time.
The math on the demolition sounds dramatic until you know where it's happening. Construction filings with the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation, registered in November 2025, call for demolishing roughly 216,000 square feet of interior space and another 190,000 square feet of exterior space, mostly parking areas. Against the mall's total 1.7 million square feet, that interior number works out to about 13 percent. It sounds like a mall losing an eighth of itself.
What it actually means is the former Sears wing, plus the corridors connecting to it, finally coming down. Sears opened as Memorial City Mall's original anchor in 1966 and closed in late 2018. MetroNational demolished the main Sears building itself back in 2020, but the connected wing remained, and MetroNational has said it could not be leased to area retailers in that condition. This latest filing, labeled "400 Gessner–North Site Phase 2" in the paperwork, finishes that job: a new ground-floor lobby, a relocated mall entrance with better street presence on Memorial City Way, and tenant-ready space where the former Sears wing stood. Gensler is the architecture firm of record.
Construction started in May 2026. If the published timeline holds, the parking and access improvements wrap by January 2027, with the full retail buildout finished that April. Macy's, Dillard's, and JCPenney are not part of this phase and are keeping their regular hours throughout, so the anchors that do most of the mall's actual foot traffic aren't the ones behind the fencing. The wing being removed is the section that has been unavailable to retailers since the Sears building came down in 2020. What replaces it, per MetroNational's own filings, leans toward food, experiential retail, and wellness or medical tenants, though the company hasn't released a final list.
While that clears out, Greenside has quietly gone from an empty warehouse lot to nearly fully leased in about a year. MetroNational broke ground on the project in April 2025 in partnership with Radom Capital, the developer behind Montrose Collective and Heights Mercantile, marking the first time the two companies had worked together. Michael Hsu Office of Architecture designed the site: three former warehouses on Gessner Road reworked around an acre of green space, with outdoor seating and walkways connecting to the existing cluster of businesses already there.
The first tenant wave, announced in February 2026, was built around self-care: Honest Mary's, the Austin-based bowl restaurant opening its second Houston location after debuting at River Oaks Shopping Center in December 2025; Leemoo Health Bar, also on its second Houston outpost after starting in Montrose Collective; Hiatus Day Spa; and solidcore, the reformer-based fitness studio already running locations in the Heights and Montrose. Pizzana, a sit-down restaurant, joined that group before the June announcement.
Then in June, MetroNational and Radom added five more names to the roster: Merit Coffee, Tifa Chocolate & Gelato, Epic Cycles, Swish Dental, and Original ChopShop. Ten tenants total, and only 3,500 square feet left unspoken for out of 35,000.
Here's the roster as it stands, with what's known about timing:
That's not a slow trickle of small openings. It's most of a shopping center's worth of new businesses landing inside a single calendar year, on a site that had no retail identity at all eighteen months ago.
It's worth knowing that MetroNational isn't just running these two projects side by side. Earlier in 2025, the company also acquired the 309,144-square-foot retail portion of CityCentre, the outdoor shopping center next to Memorial City Mall, along with the former Marathon Oil office tower next to it. Between the mall, Greenside, and now CityCentre's retail component, one landlord controls most of the commercial real estate you're likely to actually walk through in this stretch of west Houston.
That consolidation matters for understanding why the mall's demolition and Greenside's leasing spree are happening at the same time rather than in sequence. MetroNational floated a much bigger idea back in 2022: a 27-acre "town square" concept with apartments, boutiques, and an open-air plaza tying the mall to its surrounding office towers. As of 2026, that proposal remains under evaluation, meaning it hasn't been shelved but hasn't been greenlit into construction either. The Sears wing demolition and the Greenside buildout read like the company testing both halves of that eventual vision in parallel: reshape the mall's west side, and gauge demand for a walkable, outdoor format nearby before committing to the larger version.
For anyone whose errands run through this corridor, that means two different kinds of disruption at once. The mall side involves detours and temporary signage around the construction zone through at least April 2027, though the stores you're most likely to actually shop at, Macy's, Dillard's, and JCPenney, keep running on their usual schedules. The Greenside side involves something closer to a slow reveal: a coffee shop that might be new to you next week, a bowl restaurant landing sometime this fall, a fitness studio you may not have heard was coming until the parking lot filled up on a Tuesday morning.
Neither project is really finished, and neither is a straightforward before-and-after. The mall is getting smaller in one specific place, the wing left behind when Sears came down. Just across the freeway, an entirely new stretch of the neighborhood is filling in faster than the announcements can keep pace with it.
If you've been trying to keep track of what's actually open, what's still behind construction fencing, and what all these changes mean for how this part of Houston functions day to day, Wheless Realty follows this corridor closely and is always glad to compare notes. Let's Start a Conversation.
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