Two things happened in Alpharetta within the same seven days, and neither made much noise on its own. On August 17, the City Council approved a $15.9 million contract to build the next stretch of the Alpha Loop, a roughly one-mile section running from Encore Parkway to Morrison Lake at Haynes Bridge Road. Today, August 24, the council votes on whether to let Jamestown and New York Life move forward with turning North Point Mall into a 20,000-seat arena district built to court an NHL franchise.
Read those as separate stories and they're both mildly interesting. Read them together and a different picture shows up: the trail segment the city just funded isn't really a downtown amenity anymore. It's an access road, on foot and by bike, into whatever North Point is about to become. If you already walk or bike the Loop on a Saturday morning, this is the week that decision started pointing somewhere new.
What $15.9 Million Actually Buys
The contract, awarded to the design-build firm Reeves Young, covers about a mile of trail and a plaza at the Encore Parkway to Morrison Lake junction near Haynes Bridge Road. The timeline is 18.5 months, which puts a realistic finish sometime in early 2028 if the schedule holds the way these things usually do in phases. Councilman John Hipes, who has watched the project since before any section existed, put the milestone in context by noting how far the city has come since the earliest council sessions when no segments were built at all.
What makes this particular mile different from the ones that came before it is direction. The first completed stretch, finished in April 2020, ran about a mile between Downtown Alpharetta and Avalon, threading through Brooke Street Park, Thompson Street Park, and Avalon Fitness Park. A second piece opened June 1, 2024, connecting Old Milton Parkway to Northwinds Parkway, including a tunnel under Westside Parkway that's become one of the more photographed stretches of the whole system. Both of those built toward the city's existing centers of gravity, places people were already going.
The Encore-to-Morrison Lake segment is the first one explicitly built toward North Point, and from there, toward the Big Creek Greenway. Councilmember Katie Reeves said as much when the vote passed, noting the trail is closing in on the Greenway connection the city has been chasing for years.
The Mile Nobody Was Building For, Until Now
For most of the Alpha Loop's history, North Point was the awkward fourth stop nobody quite knew how to reach. The mall sat across Georgia 400 from the rest of the action, a 1990s indoor shopping center that Apple had already abandoned for Avalon back in 2014, still functioning but increasingly beside the point of where Alpharetta actually spent its evenings.
That's the context that makes this week's timing worth noticing. The same council chamber that approved trail funding toward North Point is now deciding whether that same site becomes an entertainment district anchored by professional hockey, a 4,000-seat music hall, a smaller community rink, and a movie theater, on top of housing, retail, and office space across roughly 100 acres. The Planning Commission already cleared it two weeks ago on a 4-3 vote, over objections mostly focused on the apartment component, what one commission member called "the A word" that makes residents uneasy every time it comes up in a mixed-use pitch.
The trail funding and the rezoning vote didn't have to land in the same month. They did anyway, and that's the kind of coincidence that isn't really a coincidence once you notice the city has been building the connective tissue for a destination it hadn't approved yet.
What The Completed Loop Already Looks Like
Before getting to what might come next, it's worth being precise about what's already on the ground, because the six completed miles of Alpha Loop are easy to undersell if you haven't walked the whole thing.
| Segment | Connects | Opened | Length |
|---|---|---|---|
| Downtown to Avalon | Brooke Street Park, Thompson Street Park, Avalon Fitness Park | April 2020 | ~1 mile |
| Old Milton to Northwinds | Westside Parkway tunnel | June 2024 | ~1 mile |
| Encore Parkway to Morrison Lake | Haynes Bridge Road, plaza | Approved Aug 2026, est. 2028 | ~1 mile |
Those three dated segments aren't the whole network. City officials put the total completed mileage at about six miles once smaller connector pieces are counted, which is more than half of what the eventual inner and outer loop system is meant to cover once every phase is finished. What's new with this week's contract is that, for the first time, one of those phases is aimed past Northwinds and toward North Point instead of circling back through the city's already-established center.
What This Changes If You Already Walk The Loop
If your usual route is the Downtown-to-Avalon stretch, or the newer tunnel section out toward Northwinds, none of that changes. What changes is what's on the other end once the Encore Parkway segment finishes. Right now, getting from the built portion of the Loop to North Point or the Big Creek Greenway means leaving the trail and getting back in a car. In roughly a year and a half, it won't.
That matters less for the extra distance and more for what sits at the far end of it. If the council approves the North Point rezoning today, the mall property stops being a place you drive to for a specific errand and becomes, at least on paper, a third or fourth activity center the trail actually reaches on foot. A commercial real estate broker who grew up in Alpharetta and testified at the planning commission hearing described North Point as the place where her parents took her to dinner and where she got her first American Girl doll, and said plainly that the format that made it special in 1993 doesn't work anymore. Whether the arena version works is still an open question. But the trail funding means the city isn't waiting to find out before building the way in.
The Vote Nobody's Framing As A Trail Story
The arena vote itself is not a sure thing, and even if the council approves it today, an NHL franchise is nowhere close to guaranteed. League officials have given no timeline on expansion, and Alpharetta isn't the only Atlanta-area site chasing the idea. A competing proposal in Forsyth County, about seven miles north, is pursuing the same goal with its own arena plan.
What is settled, regardless of how the hockey question resolves, is the trail. The $15.9 million contract with Reeves Young is signed and scheduled, independent of whatever the council decides about the mall today. Even in a scenario where North Point stays a mall a while longer, the Loop is still headed there, and the Big Creek Greenway connection behind it is still the long-term plan the city has been chasing since before most of the current council took office.
That's the actual news buried in this week's overlap of city business. Not that Alpharetta might get an NHL team, and not even that a trail contract got approved. It's that the two decisions were made by the same council, in the same month, pointing at the same acreage. However the arena vote lands today, the mile of trail headed toward North Point is going to get built regardless, and that's usually the more reliable signal of where a city thinks its future is standing.
If you've walked the Loop from Downtown to Avalon a hundred times and never given North Point a second thought, this is the season that starts to change. Worth keeping an eye on where the next plaza, the next tunnel, and the next connector actually lead.
Sara Harper has spent more than a decade paying attention to the details that make Metro Atlanta neighborhoods work, from trail funding to zoning votes to the small shifts that change how a place actually lives day to day. If a piece of Alpharetta news like this raises a bigger question about the market here, or anywhere else intown, Let's Connect.
