A ten-year grocery lease unlocked Decatur’s tax incentive for AMLI Market Square. The company behind the store still has not announced its name.
The grocery store you could walk from end to end in under a minute, where the cereal aisle felt like a hallway and the parking lot felt smaller than that. Baby Kroger, is what everybody called it.
The store replacing it is signed for exactly the same size, 15,000 square feet.
What is actually on paper
In a certification dated Feb. 10, 2026, PPF AMLI 750 Commerce Drive, LLC told the Decatur Downtown Development Authority that it had entered a sublease with a “Qualified Grocery Store” by Dec. 31, 2025.
The initial term is ten years. The grocer has four options to extend it for five years each.
The document does not name the company.
That is intentional. AMLI told the authority that its lease prohibits the developer from revealing the tenant or its brand before the grocer makes its own announcement.
The DDA approved an amendment allowing the financing to proceed without the name after AMLI certified that the signed tenant met the agreement’s definition of a qualified grocery store.
One company has been reported in connection with the space, but that company has not confirmed the location. Until it does, the name remains unverified.
What the certification settles is the question Decatur residents have carried since Kroger closed in late 2022. A grocery store on this block is no longer a hope attached to a rendering. It is a signed sublease with a term and square footage.
Why the lease mattered
The Decatur Downtown Development Authority approved a taxable revenue bond structure worth up to $13,994,739 for the project on March 14, 2025. The City Commission and City Schools of Decatur supported the incentive, and the economic development agreement was executed on April 3.
The agreement required a grocery lease before the bond financing could close. The city tied the incentive to a category of tenant, not a specific company, and the signed lease served as proof that the requirement had been met.
DDA Chair Conor McNally previously described the transaction as carrying no direct cost or charge to taxpayers because the developer pays the transaction expenses.
That does not mean the incentive has no fiscal effect.
The structure allows AMLI to make payments in lieu of the full property taxes it otherwise would owe during the ten-year incentive period. The project was presented to the DDA as a roughly $144 million development expected to generate about $28.5 million in taxes for the City of Decatur, its school system and DeKalb County during those ten years.
After the incentive, the taxing bodies were projected to receive approximately $14.5 million. Those are cumulative ten-year projections, not annual collections.
What shoppers get, and when
Nothing changes about a grocery trip this year or next.
Construction began on the 4.3-acre site at 720 and 750 Commerce Drive in June. By September, the former buildings were gone and infrastructure work was underway.
AMLI markets the community as coming in late 2028. A development representative has said the grocery store is expected to open in 2029.
That means the lease is real, but the opening remains more than two years away.
AMLI Market Square is planned to include 358 apartments, approximately 26,000 square feet of ground-floor retail and a 642-space parking deck. Current project descriptions identify 165 spaces as publicly accessible, with 134 intended specifically for grocery and retail customers.
Thirty-six apartments will be income-restricted for households earning up to 80 percent of Area Median Income.
Decatur’s Mandatory Inclusionary Housing policy requires developments with at least five homes to reserve a minimum of 10 percent for qualifying households. Thirty-six of 358 apartments meets that requirement almost exactly.
The size is the whole bet
The building at 720 Commerce Drive opened in the 1960s as a Colonial grocery store. It later became Kroger’s smallest metro Atlanta location and operated under the Kroger name for 21 years.
Kroger closed it in December 2022 following declining sales and negative profit.
Pope & Land assembled the block, including the neighboring offices that housed the Decatur Housing Authority and Housing Authority of DeKalb County, before AMLI purchased the property in January 2026.
Now the grocery lease returns the site to where it started: 15,000 square feet of food retail.
That does not mean the new store is repeating Kroger’s business model. A small-format grocer can carry a narrower inventory, sell more private-label products, operate with different staffing and margins and depend more heavily on frequent neighborhood trips.
It is a different strategy inside the same amount of space.
But the size remains the central question. Decatur used its incentive to secure a grocery store in the exact footprint where a conventional supermarket stopped working.
The new operator is betting that the problem was not the square footage. It was what Kroger tried to do with it.
A signed ten-year lease is considerably stronger than a grocery label on a rendering. Decatur also wrote the incentive correctly by requiring the developer to secure a qualifying grocer before receiving the benefit. What the agreement did not secure was a public name or an immediate opening. The next useful update will come when the grocer announces itself or submits its buildout plans. After that, the question becomes whether a specialized 15,000-square-foot store can succeed where a conventional Kroger could not. I would not dismiss the store because it matches Baby Kroger’s size. I also would not treat a confidential lease signed three years before opening as the same thing as a grocery store residents can use.
The paper is finished. The test begins in 2029.
