Ask most people who've lived in Union City for more than a decade what happened to the mall, and you'll get some version of the same answer: "There's a movie studio there now, I think." That's true, but it's also the least interesting part of the story. Atlanta Metro Studios has been running soundstages on part of that old footprint for years. What actually changed this year is that two more completely different projects, a senior housing community and a public park with a 3,000-seat amphitheater, landed on the same acreage within months of each other, and neither one looks anything like the other or like the studio next door.
That's the part worth understanding if you live here. The old Shannon Mall didn't get redeveloped the way most dead malls do, with one master developer building one thing. It got split into three separate uses that solve three separate problems the city had, and 2026 is the year all three finally became visible at once.
Three Projects, One Address, No Single Blueprint
Shannon Mall opened in 1980 along Interstate 85 and Georgia Highway 138, and at its peak it carried four department stores and more than 100 specialty shops. It went into decline through the 1990s as retailers left for newer developments, and it closed for good in 2010. Atlanta-based developer Rooker bought the roughly 90-acre site in 2014 with plans to redevelop it, and the first thing that actually got built was Atlanta Metro Studios, a production facility that opened in partnership with 404 Studio Partners years ago and has been quietly operating ever since.
Then, for a long stretch, that was the whole story. The mall's footprint stayed a mix of demolished retail pad, dead parking lot, and one working studio. If you drove past on Shannon Parkway, most of the property still looked unfinished, because it was.
That changed on two fronts almost simultaneously. In May 2026, developer Dominium held a ribbon-cutting for Shannon Reserve, a 166-unit affordable housing community built on what had been a long-empty asphalt parking lot beside the old mall. And back in the fall of 2025, the city selected a construction team to break ground on the first phase of the Reimagine Park Project, a 15-acre greenspace with a 3,000-seat amphitheater, situated near the intersection of Shannon Parkway and Mall Boulevard, just north of the old mall footprint.
Three different property types. Three different funding structures. Three different reasons to exist. That's not how most abandoned malls get rebuilt, and it's the reason this site took over a decade to feel like it was actually coming together.
What's Actually There Now
| Project | What It Is | Status | Footprint |
|---|---|---|---|
| Atlanta Metro Studios | Film and TV production facility, soundstages and production offices | Operating for several years | Roughly 135,000 square feet of soundstage space, with the wider campus, including production offices and flex space, totaling closer to 245,000 square feet |
| Shannon Reserve | Income-restricted housing for renters 55 and older | Ribbon-cutting held May 2026 | 166 units across one five-story building and two four-unit cottages |
| Reimagine Park Project | Public greenspace and amphitheater | Phase one construction began December 2025, targeted for April 2026 delivery | 15 acres, including a 3,000-seat amphitheater with bandshell, green room, and over 700 surface parking spaces |
Why the Studio Sat Alone for Almost a Decade
The gap between the studio's opening and everything else that's now filling in matters, because it explains why the site felt stalled for so long even though Rooker technically owned and was "redeveloping" all of it the entire time. Large-scale sites like this rarely get rebuilt in one motion. A developer buys the whole parcel, builds the piece that pencils out fastest, usually something with a single corporate tenant like a studio or distribution center, and then waits years for the rest of the acreage to attract housing capital or public funding.
That's exactly what happened here. Atlanta Metro Studios made sense as a first move because it required one tenant relationship and one construction timeline. Everything else on the property, the senior housing and the public park, needed different funding entirely: Low-Income Housing Tax Credits for Shannon Reserve, and a city-led capital project for the amphitheater. Those take longer to assemble, which is why residents spent years watching one building operate next to acres of nothing.
Union City officials have framed the slower pieces as intentional, not stalled. Mayor Vince Williams, describing the amphitheater project, put it this way:
"Together, we're not just building a park. We're building the heart of Union City's future."
The Reimagine Park Project sits inside the city's R3 Master Plan, shorthand for reclaim, renew, reimagine, and the team behind phase one includes Manhattan Construction Company as construction manager, Atlas Technical Consultants managing the program, Foresite Group handling site and landscape design, and McMillan Pazdan Smith Architecture leading the architectural design.
The Piece That Just Landed: Shannon Reserve
Shannon Reserve is the one that's actually finished and occupied. The community sits about eight miles southwest of Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, off Interstate 85, on what used to be a long-idle stretch of the old mall's parking lot. It includes one five-story multifamily building plus two four-unit cottages, for a total of 166 apartments, and it's reserved for renters age 55 and older, with all other household members required to be at least 40.
The economics are worth understanding if you're weighing what this means for the surrounding area. Units are income-restricted to no more than 60 percent of Area Median Income. The one floor plan listed as available, a two-bedroom at 995 square feet, starts at $1,443 a month, and a single renter applying for that unit needs to earn between $34,632 and $48,000 annually to qualify. That's a specific, capped price point, built by a national affordable housing developer using federal Low-Income Housing Tax Credits, not a market-rate project testing what the area can bear.
For a site that had been generating zero tax revenue and zero foot traffic for over a decade, that's 166 occupied units and a construction payroll that didn't exist here two years ago.
The Piece That's Supposed to Be Landing Right Now
The amphitheater is the harder one to report on cleanly, because the timeline and the calendar don't quite line up yet. When the city announced its construction team last fall, the plan was for phase one work to begin in December 2025 and deliver by April 2026. It's now August, four months past that target, and there's no publicly confirmed grand opening date yet for the greenspace or the amphitheater itself.
That gap isn't unusual for a public infrastructure project of this size, a 15-acre site with a 3,000-seat venue, a bandshell, a green room, and standalone buildings for restrooms, concessions, and ticketing, plus more than 700 surface parking spaces to grade and pave. But if you live nearby and you've been expecting to see a finished amphitheater by now, the honest answer is: not yet, based on anything that's been made public. What you should expect to see, if the project is tracking close to plan, is a site that looks substantially built out even if it hasn't hosted its first show.
What Changes for a Saturday in Union City
None of this reshapes daily life on its own. What it does is stack on top of a dining scene that's also filling in around the same corridor, which is the part that actually shows up on a weekend.
- Jack's Family Restaurant, a Southern fast-casual chain that started in Alabama in 1960 and now runs more than 285 locations across six states, filed bidding documents in July 2026 for a new ground-up location at 5135 Campbellton Fairburn Road, near the Starbucks and Chevron.
- Atlanta Black Restaurant Week runs August 2 through 16, 2026, and specifically spans the ATL Airport District, including Fairburn, Hapeville, South Fulton, and Union City, spotlighting Black-owned restaurants, food trucks, and bakeries.
- The Green Manor, a Union City landmark built in 1910 and operating as a restaurant since 1990, is still serving its Southern buffet on the same porch it's had for over three decades.
Put those three things next to a soundstage that's already running productions, 166 newly occupied apartments, and a park that's supposed to be substantially built, and the pattern is that this stretch of Union City stopped being a place people drove past on the way to somewhere else. It's becoming a place with its own reasons to stop.
If you've been watching this corridor and wondering what it means for property values or timing a move, that's a longer conversation, and one worth having with someone who tracks this market closely rather than guessing from a drive-by. C Garrett Group works with buyers and sellers across Union City and the surrounding Metro Atlanta submarkets every week. Let's Connect if you want a read on what a corridor like this actually does to nearby home values, not just what got built on it.
