Southland Center

Detroit’s four Hudson Corporation-developed “land” malls, Northland, Eastland, Westland and Southland, opened in sequence between the 1950s and 1970, with Southland arriving last on July 20, 1970 under a Victor Gruen Associates design. Greenwood Global, a Chicago-area investment group, bought the property from Brookfield Properties in January 2025 after Brookfield defaulted on the mall’s loan in 2022, with Jones Lang LaSalle taking over day-to-day management.

Macy’s, JCPenney and Century Theatres anchor the enclosed format alongside Round1 Bowling & Arcade, while the inline mix runs through mall standards like H&M, Victoria’s Secret and Foot Locker. Forever 21 closed in March 2025, less than two months after the ownership change, in a departure tied to the chain’s broader exit from Michigan rather than to anything specific at Southland.

A large share of the smaller inline units carry independent, single-location tenants rather than national chains: jewelry repair counters, phone-repair kiosks, and food vendors selling kabob and hot dog fare sit alongside the mall standards, a leasing mix that reads less like a traditional department-store-anchored regional mall and more like a flexible, low-barrier marketplace layered inside one.

That format gives Greenwood Global a wider pool of potential tenants to backfill space than a landlord chasing only national retailers would have. Whether the new ownership leans further into that independent-tenant model or works to rebalance toward national chains will show up first in how the vacant Forever 21 space gets filled.