Mary Kathryn Lee runs Wrapsody at Stadium Trace Village, and she remembers when the center wasn't much of a center at all. "It was just us, Aldi and Culver's for a while," she told a Birmingham TV station this month, describing the early days of the development off Highway 150. That was 2019. Seven years and dozens of storefronts later, the tenant list runs past thirty, a two-hundred-room dual-brand Hilton anchors one corner, and a UAB medical office sits on another. On August 20, the story took its next turn: developers closed on 65 acres of land behind the existing center, land they had been watching for roughly three years, to start building what the city has been calling Phase II.
If you have driven past that stretch of cleared dirt and woods behind the Aldi for the last several years and wondered why nothing ever happened there while everything around it filled in, there is a specific, unglamorous answer, and it has nothing to do with permits or zoning fights.
The Ground Wasn't Empty by Choice
At a June 22 Hoover City Council meeting, City Administrator Brian Muenger laid out why that particular parcel sat untouched for so long: nine vertical mine shafts run underneath it, some reaching 71 feet down, along with additional air vents left over from old coal operations. Filling and stabilizing that ground is expected to cost around $42 million before anyone can pour a foundation. Council member Steve McClinton put it more bluntly at the same meeting: "The topography is terrible. You have mines that have to be filled in." He pointed out that Broad Metro, the development company behind Stadium Trace Village, already spent $60 million just moving dirt to build the original 44-acre Phase I, and he expects the bill for Phase II to run higher still.
That is the part of this story that rarely makes it onto a chamber of commerce flyer: the reason Hoover's newest expansion is happening now, on this specific tract, is that someone finally decided the numbers from Phase I justified the cost of digging out a century of old mining work.
Those numbers are public. Broad Metro told the council that the existing Stadium Trace Village draws more than 3.5 million visitors a year, about half of them from outside Hoover, and has generated more than $252 million in taxable revenue since it opened. A city audit found the first phase returned roughly $7.4 million combined to Hoover and Hoover City Schools over seven years. On July 13, the City Council approved a $28 million incentive package, spread over 20 years, to help Broad Metro cover the site work and move ahead.
What's Actually Going In
The mix headed for those 65 acres does not look like more of the same retail. The anchor project is South Haven Surgical Plaza, an 80,000-square-foot healthcare campus. Independent living, assisted living, and memory care facilities for seniors are part of the plan too, along with a new gathering space the city is calling Village Green. For entertainment, Chasing Aces, a Louisiana-based golf entertainment concept, is set to open what would likely be its second Alabama location. Mayor Nick Derzis described it during a council session as family-oriented, saying it will include "an area with a big screen TV and restaurants that people can bring their kids," with room to play and unwind.
Getting there will also mean new roads. Peridot Place, the main thoroughfare through the existing Phase I development, is set to extend south all the way to Brock's Gap Parkway, tying in across from Brock's Cove. At a public hearing in July, more than half a dozen residents spoke in favor of the expansion overall but pushed the city for more detail on that road extension before construction starts. Sughey Ibarra, who shops at Stadium Trace Village several times a week, said she is looking forward to what's coming, especially the golf entertainment piece for her kids, but named the same concern nearly everyone else raised: "The only thing is: traffic."
Meanwhile, on a Completely Different Clock
None of that construction timeline has much to do with what has actually opened around Hoover this summer. While the city works out road extensions and mine-shaft engineering on one end of town, a separate, faster wave of small openings has been filling in older storefronts closer to where people already live.
At the Hoover Public Library, NOIR has taken over a corner of the building with a coffee menu built around a rotating croissant waffle collection called CR9WN No. 9. On Highway 150, Oak & Ale opened as a new neighborhood pub with regular live music. Sakana Sushi Bar & Grill, the all-you-can-eat spot that closed briefly this spring, reopened in June. Down in Bluff Park, The Park Nutrition started serving grab-and-go shakes and energy teas for people headed to or from Moss Rock Preserve. At Caldwell, a self-serve bakery stand called Small Joys Bahas, an offshoot of the earlier Small Joys Homemade, now sets out fresh baked goods every Friday and Saturday while supplies last. Zad Mediterranean opened with a menu built around char-grilled kabobs and hand-rolled grape leaves. Whiskey Foxtrot Burgers is set to open by the end of this month, with Southern Steer Butcher expected sometime later in the year.
None of these openings needed a city council vote or a mine-shaft survey. They needed a lease and a kitchen. That is the actual texture of change in Hoover right now: one very large, very slow, very expensive bet on a stretch of ground nobody could touch for decades, running on a completely separate calendar from a dozen smaller bets that a coffee shop, a sushi counter, or a bakery stand can find an audience fast.
What Else to Put on the Fall Calendar
Aldridge Gardens has its own fall marker worth circling: Taste of Hoover returns on October 15, with tickets going on sale this month as the garden finalizes its list of participating restaurants and caterers. It is a fundraiser for the gardens themselves, the 30-acre property built around Eddie and Kay Aldridge's original collection of Snowflake Hydrangeas, and one of the few nights the grounds stay open past their usual 7 p.m. closing.
For a quieter version of fall, Moss Rock Preserve is still there with its roughly 12 miles of hiking trail, maintained through a partnership between city staff and the volunteer group Friends of Moss Rock Preserve. Once the worst of the late-summer heat breaks, it is a reasonable bet for a Saturday morning that does not involve a shopping center at all.
The Actual Shape of Hoover's Growth Right Now
Put together, none of this reads as a single story about a neighborhood on the rise. It reads as two stories running at different speeds. One is a multi-year, mine-shaft-clearing, $200 million infrastructure bet that will not open its doors for a while yet but is already reshaping what residents can expect near Highway 150 and I-459: medical care, senior housing, and family entertainment instead of another round of retail. The other is a scattered, month-by-month churn of small independent openings, a library coffee shop here, a reopened sushi counter there, that is already changing what a Tuesday night in Hoover looks like without waiting on any council vote.
If you already live here, both of those tracks are worth watching, for very different reasons.
Keeping track of what's actually changing block by block, not just what shows up in a listing description, is part of how Jake Callahan works with buyers and sellers across Hoover and the rest of the Birmingham metro. If a move is somewhere on your horizon, or you're simply curious what a home near Stadium Trace Village or Bluff Park is worth with all of this in motion, request a free home valuation and consultation for a straight answer grounded in what's happening in the neighborhood right now.
