Decatur Bet $13 Million on a Grocery Lease. The Store Is the Same Size as the One That Left.

A grocery store is coming back to the Baby Kroger block in Decatur, and the lease is signed. The space will be 15,000 square feet, the same footprint as Baby Kroger, which closed in 2022.

The store sits inside AMLI Market Square, a mixed-use development with 358 apartments, 26,000 square feet of ground-floor retail, and 165 public parking spaces. Thirty-six of those apartments will be income-restricted at 80 percent of Area Median Income.

The money came with a leash. Decatur's Downtown Development Authority approved a $13 million incentive in March 2025 on the condition that the bonds could not close until a grocery lease was signed. In February, the developer certified a ten-year lease with four five-year extension options. The grocer's name has not been announced.

The lease term is where I would put my attention. Ten years with four five-year extension options is a grocer signing up for the possibility of five decades on a block that stopped working for the last one. Whoever signed it has looked at the 358 apartments going up overhead and decided the rooftops change the math.

My take: the footprint is not the variable that matters, the daytime and evening population is, and this deal builds the population and the store at the same time instead of hoping one shows up for the other. That is the difference between 2022 and this. It is also the part nobody can verify until people move in. Site work began in June, and apartment pre-leasing is expected in late 2028.