Every Provo kid of a certain era has a memory of the Towne Centre when it was the mall — packed parking lots, food-court birthdays, the works. Those days are long gone, and the numbers behind the quiet hallways are now driving the biggest redevelopment proposal in the city: a roughly $500 million plan to turn 23 acres of East Bay, mall included, into what the developers themselves call a "mini town."
The plan is real, the money is real, and the process is well underway — but less has been decided than the renderings suggest. Here's where things actually stand.
Who's behind it
Brixton Capital, a California-based real estate investment firm, has owned the Provo Towne Centre since 2016 and completed its ownership of the property with the purchase of the former Dillard's building in 2022. Its local partner is PEG Companies, the Provo-based development and investment firm. The two have been working the concept with the city for years; Brixton project executive Justin Long told the Planning Commission the team had spent four years on it. Phase one is already standing: the Target that opened on the south side of the mall in 2024.
What's actually proposed
The redevelopment covers 23 acres Brixton owns in East Bay — the mall itself plus the neighboring Shady Acres Mobile Home Park. The headline pieces:
- De-malling the mall. The enclosed interior — including the central rotunda — would be opened up and replaced with an outdoor plaza and a walkable retail, dining, and entertainment district. Three anchors are planned to stay: Target, JCPenney, and Cinemark. Ownership has said it will work with other current tenants who want a place in the new development, with the timing of any interior closure depending on approvals and lease-up.
- About 1,300 apartments in five residential buildings north of the mall, where a parking garage and surface lots sit today.
- 83 townhomes — 72 of them on the current Shady Acres site northwest of the mall, 11 directly north of it.
- A transit logic underneath it all: the site sits near Provo Central Station and the UVX bus rapid transit line, which is why the developers are asking for the city's Interim Transit-Oriented Development (ITOD) zone — the designation Provo created to concentrate dense, mixed-use development around transit.
The developers' argument is blunt: the format is dying. They told the city the Towne Centre ranks in the bottom 20% of U.S. malls for foot traffic, and national research they cited suggests more than 300 of America's roughly 1,200 malls could close within two years. Planning commissioner Lisa Jensen put it more memorably during the March hearing: "It's a zombie mall right now."
The Shady Acres question
The hardest part of this story isn't retail strategy — it's the people living next to the mall. Shady Acres is some of the cheapest housing in Provo, home to longtime residents, many on fixed incomes, some of whom own their homes but not the land under them. Brixton owns the park, and the plan replaces it with townhomes.
What the developer has said: residents would get up to 18 months' notice, the company wants to "work with each of them individually," and 3% of the development's units would be affordable at 60% of area median income. What the law says: Utah requires no relocation assistance for displaced mobile-home residents — a gap housing advocates have pointed to in this exact case, noting that even residents whose homes can be moved face bills around $10,000 and few parks to move them to.
The tension has reached city leadership. Mayor Marsha Judkins has said the potential loss of the park worries her, tying it to Provo's broader affordability crunch — Utah County homelessness rose 34% in 2025, per the state's annual Point-in-Time count. And the Planning Commission itself flagged the problem structurally: commissioners recommended the mobile-home section of the property be considered separately from the ITOD rezone, arguing the townhome parcel isn't genuinely integrated with the transit-oriented core. "They're completely physically different," commissioner Jon Lyons said. "I don't feel like they're related at all."
There's also the nerd factor
One more thread that makes this a very Provo story: in its quiet years, the Towne Centre filled with local, community-run shops — game stores, hobby shops, small entrepreneurs — and picked up a reputation online as "America's nerdiest mall." We Geek Together, the gaming shop that opened in 2022, holds a Guinness World Record for the largest game of Dungeons & Dragons ever played. At public meetings, a recurring worry has been that a polished national-tenant district would price out exactly the businesses that gave the dying mall a second life. Tenants who spoke publicly haven't necessarily opposed the project — several asked mainly for time and clarity to relocate.
Where the approvals stand
The proposal needs a general plan amendment, the ITOD rezone, and concept plan approval. Here's the scorecard as of publication:
- March 11, 2026 — The Planning Commission voted unanimously to recommend the general plan amendment and ITOD rezone to the City Council (with the suggestion that Shady Acres be handled separately). But it voted 6-2 to continue the concept plan rather than approve it, citing traffic, pedestrian walkability, sewer and infrastructure questions, the unresolved Shady Acres impacts — and the fact that the city is currently rewriting its ITOD code, which the commission wants the plan to match.
- April 14, 2026 — The rezone and general plan requests went to the City Council. As of early July, the council has not announced a final vote on them; per reporting this spring, the council planned to take up the Shady Acres question in further work sessions, and no approval has been reported.
- Still ahead — Even with a rezone, the developers must return to the Planning Commission with a revised concept plan — and the commission, not the council, has final approval over that plan.
In short: the land-use framework has momentum, the detailed plan does not yet have a green light, and nothing about Shady Acres is settled.
What it means for Provo
If it's built as proposed, East Bay gets roughly 1,400 new homes, a walkable district next to the city's main transit hub, and a commercial engine where a fading one now sits — the kind of infill Provo's own general plan says it wants near transit. The open questions are the ones the Planning Commission left on the table: whether the traffic and infrastructure work, whether the townhome parcel belongs in a transit zone at all, and what happens to the people of Shady Acres, whose fate currently depends on a developer's goodwill rather than any legal requirement.
Construction, if approvals land, wouldn't start immediately — the developer has previously estimated infrastructure work would begin six to twelve months after a green light, with the residential build-out phased over years.
For the broader housing picture this plugs into, see our Provo real estate market analysis and the BYU Wymount Terrace rebuild — two more fronts in the same valley-wide story of a city rebuilding itself from the inside. We'll track the council's decision and the revised concept plan on The Wire.
Facts current as of July 10, 2026.