If you've been comparing Clarksville to other Middle Tennessee submarkets and someone mentioned "Costco is coming behind Governor's Square Mall," they were right. That part is real, named, and on the record as of July 2026. What usually gets left out is the timeline, and the timeline is the part that should actually change how you think about buying near that corridor right now.
A retail headline and a repriced neighborhood are two different things. Between them sits a zoning vote, an incentive structure, a road that isn't finished, and a highway exit that hasn't been approved. Freedom Farms has cleared the first of those. The rest are still in motion, and understanding exactly where each one stands is the difference between paying a premium for something that's already delivered and paying a premium for a press release.
What Actually Got Rezoned
The land behind Governor's Square Mall, next to I-24 and near the hospital campus now known as Vanderbilt Clarksville, sat as farmland for years. In August 2025, the Clarksville-Montgomery County Regional Planning Commission took up a request to rezone about 200 acres of it. The breakdown was specific:
| Zoning Change | Approximate Acreage | What It Allows |
|---|---|---|
| R-1 to C-3 | 98 acres | Regional shopping center |
| M-1/M-3 to C-4 | 95 acres | Highway interchange commercial |
| M-1/M-3 to C-5 | 7 acres | Highway and arterial commercial |
The commission recommended approval unanimously. The City Council passed the first of two required readings on September 4, 2025, by a vote of 12 to 1. The one no vote came from Ward 7 Councilman Travis Holleman, who wasn't against the tax revenue but asked a fair question out loud: when does the city stop growing. The developer, Oldacre McDonald, named the project Freedom Farms as a nod to the 101st Airborne Division at Fort Campbell. At that same meeting, the company's co-founder, Mark McDonald, would only describe the anchor tenant as a "discount" retailer. Nobody outside the deal knew who it actually was.
Why That Farmland Was Almost Untaxed
Here's the detail that matters if you're trying to understand how a corridor's value actually shifts. Before the rezoning, that land sat in the state's greenbelt program as agricultural property. The attorney representing the sellers put it plainly to the council: undeveloped, it generated zero sales tax, next to nothing in property tax because of the greenbelt classification, and zero jobs.
That's the pattern worth remembering anywhere in Clarksville, not just here. Land near a fast-growing corridor can carry an agricultural tax bill for years right up until a rezoning flips it into a completely different value and tax category overnight. The comps you see today on land like that don't reflect what it becomes the day the zoning changes. They reflect what it was worth as a hay field.
The Incentive Isn't A Handout
Once Costco was named as the anchor tenant in July 2026, the Montgomery County Economic Development Council brought a $21.5 million incentive package to the county budget committee. It's structured in a way that's worth understanding before you assume "incentive" means the city just wrote a check.
Costco doesn't get any of that money up front. The company is projected to generate about $250 million a year in sales in its first year, climbing past $300 million by year three, based on typical performance in other Tennessee stores. That translates to roughly $6.25 million a year in local sales tax. Of that, $2.15 million a year comes back to Costco for ten years, but only after the store has been open a full year and only if it keeps hitting the revenue thresholds. If it doesn't, the incentive doesn't pay out. That leaves roughly $4.1 million a year flowing to the city, county, and school system from Costco alone, before counting a single dollar from the other 200 acres of Freedom Farms, where local governments keep 100 percent of the sales tax with no incentive attached.
EDC President Buck Dellinger framed the competition for stores like this bluntly at the budget committee meeting. Industrial Development Board President Josh Ward put it this way when asked why Clarksville was chasing a retailer that famously picks its own markets:
"We're trying to get Clarksville, Tennessee, on the list next to Tokyo, Japan, and Germany, and Europe, and Dallas and Austin. They can hand-pick where they want to go, because everybody wants them, and with your help, we think we can get them here."
That's a sales pitch, and it's fair to hear it as one. The financial structure underneath it, though, is genuinely conservative. The city isn't betting tax dollars it already has. It's giving up a share of tax dollars that don't exist yet, and only if Costco delivers.
Ten Months Between "Somebody's Coming" And A Name
If you were watching this story unfold in real time, you waited a long time for the reveal. The council passed first reading in September 2025 with the tenant still unnamed. Costco wasn't publicly confirmed until July 2026. That's roughly ten months of a big, unnamed retailer sitting in local headlines while nothing visible happened on the ground.
That gap is normal, and it's the part buyers underestimate. Corporate real estate approval, site plan revisions, and incentive negotiations take longer than the initial press conference implies. If you're weighing whether to pay up for a home near a corridor because "something big is coming," ask where that something actually is in the process. A name announced in a news release is not the same as a permit pulled or a foundation poured. As of this writing, no groundbreaking date has been announced for Freedom Farms.
The Roads Aren't Finished, Either
Access is the other half of this. Right now, Wilma Rudolph Boulevard is essentially the only way in and out of the Governor's Square Mall area, and it's already under pressure from interstate traffic and existing retail. The city's Spring Creek Parkway extension, running from Trenton Road to Wilma Rudolph, is close to completion. Under the current plan, Oldacre McDonald will extend Spring Creek Parkway through the Freedom Farms site at its own expense and connect it to Ted A. Crozier Sr. Boulevard, then hand the new roads over to the city. Two other roads on the property, Athletic Avenue and Dunlop Lane, are currently underused and expected to absorb some of the new traffic once they're connected.
Montgomery County and the EDC are also asking the Tennessee Department of Transportation to consider a new interstate exit between the existing Exit 4 and Exit 8, informally called "Exit 6," to feed directly into the site. That's a request under discussion with TDOT. It isn't approved, funded, or scheduled. If you're pricing a home partly on the assumption that a new exit ramp will cut your drive time, you're pricing in something that hasn't cleared a single government process yet.
What This Means If You're Comparing Corridors
None of this means Freedom Farms is a bad bet or a bad reason to like the Governor's Square Mall corridor. Governor's Square itself has been reinvesting on its own timeline. Cafaro Company, which owns the mall, completed a significant renovation in 2024, added a Dave & Buster's and an Aldi that same year, and opened a Phoenix Theatres location in May 2025, the brand's first in the Southeast. Cafaro also points to $5 billion in capital investment and more than 7,500 jobs added in Clarksville since 2000, and cites Clarksville's population growing 24 percent over the past decade, as reasons the area keeps attracting retailers. Those are numbers the mall's owner has every reason to promote, and they're also directionally consistent with what's visible on the ground.
The lesson isn't to discount the corridor. It's to separate what's delivered from what's promised, and to price accordingly. The zoning is done. The incentive structure is real and conservatively built. The tenant is named. The roads and the exit ramp are not. If you're comparing this stretch of Clarksville against other submarkets, that's the actual state of play today, not the headline version.
A Few Questions Worth Asking
Has Costco broken ground yet? No public groundbreaking date has been announced as of this writing. The incentive package still had to clear Montgomery County Commission approval as of late July 2026.
Will homes near Freedom Farms get more expensive because of this? Retail-anchored corridors typically see demand shift gradually as access, tenants, and traffic patterns actually change, not the moment a name is announced. The road and exit questions above are unresolved, which affects how quickly that shift shows up.
Where exactly is this relative to established neighborhoods? The site sits off Wilma Rudolph Boulevard near I-24, between the hospital campus and the interstate, adjacent to Governor's Square Mall.
If you're weighing a purchase in Clarksville based on a growth story like this one, the right move is to separate what's actually recorded from what's still projected before you factor it into an offer. Make Clarksville Home can walk through the specific corridors, zoning history, and timelines that apply to whatever part of town you're considering. Schedule a free consultation and we'll get you the real state of play, not the press release version.
