Silo Square development exceeding expectations

When developer Brian Hill first broke ground on Silo Square over two years ago, getting businesses to sign on the dotted line for a chance to get in on the ground floor in the first ever town square in Southaven was initially a hard sell.

Hill said prospective clients were a little reluctant to jump on board because there were so many projects similar to what he was proposing that just never happened.

But once people saw that he was actually spending money to install infrastructure at the site, then his phone started to ring.

“When I first started this project, there were a lot of doubts from a lot of people,” Hill said. “Then it became a really easy sell because everybody could see that we were doing what we said we were going to do. We were going to create a town square. And we are well on our way. It is certainly an easy sell now.”

Silo Square, which is located along Getwell Road in Southaven, features a diverse mixture of residential homes and upscale retail shopping and unique dining in a town square setting, will be one of the most unique places in North Mississippi when completed.

Hill said the $200 million, 228 acre mixed-use development project is now exceeding his expectations, but not his dreams.

On the residential side, only three lots remain out of 80 in the two sections that have been developed that have not been sold. There will eventually be 450 total residential units. They are completely sold out on all of the loft apartments with a waiting list for the next building. And only one space remains vacant in the existing six town square buildings. Three more buildings on the square will soon be under construction.

Central BBQ, a popular Memphis BBQ restaurant, recently announced that they will be opening a new location in Silo Square, along with Dappled, a women’s boutique, HOTWORX sauna studio, Staks Pancake Kitchen, Georgia Blue, and The Wing Guru. Construction on Planters Bank and Trust Company’s new North Mississippi headquarters is underway, and another financial institution, Bank3, will be holding its grand opening later this month.

“With all of what is going on in the world right now, it’s nice to have something positive going on right here,” Hill said. “Even though all of the businesses aren’t open yet, they are in some stage of construction and planning. We are almost full.”

And next week, contractors will be hoisting the metal bridge span onto the $1.9 million pedestrian bridge towers over the intersection of Getwell and May Blvd. which will eventually link the city’s walking trails at Central Park and Snowden Grove and make it easier to walk to the amenities at Silo Square.

“The bridge is going to be spectacular,” Hill said. “That is something that is really great for Southaven. Very few communities have something like that. Connecting those two parks with this multi-use path is just really cool.”

Hill, who grew up in Southaven, said he is especially excited to see the Town Square take shape because the city never had a real downtown. 

Back in the 1970s, Southaven’s population was only 9,000 and didn’t even have a McDonald’s. It saw rapid growth in the 1980s as residents moved out of Memphis to the suburbs, and today has over 53,000 residents and continues to be one of the state’s fastest growing cities.

“Southaven never had that charming area,” Hill said. “They built Southaven really fast after people started moving out of Memphis in the 1960s and didn’t build it around a town square. So it  is pretty cool to build a town square in the city I grew up in.”

Hill said so far he has been able to attract every single type of business that he originally envisioned for the Town Square, which he modeled after the ones in Collierville, Tennessee, and Oxford.

“When I first started this and first drew out the town square, one of the first things I did was create a chart of what I thought it would look like when it was finished,” Hill said. “So I literally have a sheet of paper where I wrote out the name of a business - not a specific business - but the type of business I would want to put on the town square. And we are getting those businesses. We’ve turned down some because that’s not what we are going after. So everything I ever envisioned, those folks are calling us and it is coming together like we wanted it to.”

In fact, Hill said he and his daughter, Lexie, have more business between showing people property and leases and contracts than they can handle.

“We probably average five to seven calls for commercial property a week,” Hill said. “That’s pretty spectacular. It’s been all we can do to keep up. If it had not been for COVID, I think it would have been more than we could have ever handled.”

Mayor Darren Musselwhite, who has been a champion of the Silo Square development, said he is extremely pleased to see the city’s first entertainment district coming together, and that it will become a destination point for tourism. 

“This area has been a vision of ours for several years and is now becoming a reality,” Musselwhite said. “It is going to bring enjoyment for so many of our citizens with new restaurants, shopping, and a pedestrian-friendly lifestyle like never before. Personally seeing this progress is very rewarding to me as this has been one of my priorities in bringing amenities to Southaven that have never existed here before.”

Hill said they expect to break ground soon on another commercial building and that two more will follow shortly after that.

“We definitely have several more announcements coming in the next couple of months,” Hill said.