"We are in constant communication with the NHL."
That is Vernon Krause, the developer behind The Gathering at South Forsyth, talking to Fox 5 Atlanta in February 2026. It is also the sentence that has kept South Forsyth residents checking Urbanize Atlanta and the Forsyth County Facebook comments for three years running. Every few months a new rendering surfaces, a new dollar figure gets attached to it, and the same question resurfaces at the coffee shop counter: is this thing actually happening, or is it another mall site that sits cleared and empty for a decade.
Here is what most of that chatter misses. The Gathering is not one project waiting on one answer. It is two projects with two entirely different funding mechanisms, and only one of them is stuck waiting on a professional sports league. The other one does not care what the NHL decides, and the county's own paperwork says so.
What the county actually signed
In March 2024, the Forsyth County Board of Commissioners approved a Memorandum of Understanding with Krause Sports and Entertainment that split the project into two funding tracks. The developer privately finances the commercial office and retail space, a hotel, multifamily and single-family residential, a 1.2-mile connection to the Big Creek Greenway, plus a new fire station and sheriff's office precinct. None of that requires a professional sports franchise to show up. It is a real estate deal, financed the way real estate deals get financed, on land at Union Hill Road and Ronald Reagan Boulevard that has sat vacant since a regional mall proposal fell through roughly fifteen years earlier.
The arena is the other track, and it is where the county drew a hard line. Forsyth County committed up to $225 million toward the arena, down from an initial pledge of $390 million floated in January 2024, and that money activates only after the NHL awards a franchise. In June 2025, the county, the school board and the development authority signed off on the final agreements that lock in the tax allocation district and payment structure. Voters granted the county the redevelopment powers to run that district in the November 2024 general election, by a 56 to 44 margin. Every legal mechanism is in place. The only missing signature belongs to a league office in New York.
The number that keeps moving
When Krause first announced the project in April 2023, he pitched it as a $2 billion mixed-use district. By the summer of 2026, Forsyth County officials were describing it as a $3 billion undertaking in public reporting. That is not inflation talk. It reflects what has actually happened to the cost of landing an NHL expansion team since 2023.
Fox 5 Atlanta reported in February 2026 that the going rate for a new NHL franchise had climbed to roughly $2 billion, nearly double the combined expansion fees paid by the two most recent additions to the league, the Vegas Golden Knights and the Seattle Kraken. That figure sits entirely separate from the county's $225 million arena commitment and the arena's own estimated $700 million construction cost. Krause still says his group is negotiating with the league on the assumption that number holds. NHL commissioner Gary Bettman, asked about Atlanta's prospects during the 2025 Stanley Cup Playoffs, said the league remains open to a return but is unlikely to open a formal expansion process before it finishes negotiating a new labor agreement with the players' union. There is no clock running on that timeline that anyone outside the league office controls.
There is also no guarantee South Forsyth wins the site even if the NHL does expand to Atlanta. A competing group led by former NHL player Anson Carter, Alpharetta Sports & Entertainment, floated its own arena proposal in spring 2024 for the North Point Mall property, about six miles south of the Union Hill Road site. Two Georgia billion-dollar bets are effectively chasing the same hockey team.
So here is the honest version of where things stand. If you are waiting to see puck drop before you believe any of this is real, plan on years, not months, and understand the site itself is not locked in. If you are asking what changes on the ground regardless of what the NHL does, the answer is already under construction, and it is not on the arena parcel.
The part that does not need a hockey team
A few miles up the same corridor, at Ronald Reagan Boulevard and Peachtree Parkway, a completely different developer is already pouring concrete. Fuqua Development is building Forsyth Town Center on 35 acres directly across from The Collection at Forsyth, anchored by a Whole Foods Market that will be the first new one to open in metro Atlanta in more than five years. As of the most recent construction updates in June 2026, no opening date has been set, but the site has moved from cleared land to a visible vertical build. The store itself is expected to land in the 35,000 to 36,000 square foot range. The nearest existing Whole Foods sits roughly ten miles south at Avalon in Alpharetta, currently one of the higher-traffic grocery locations in the region, which is the drive most South Forsyth households have been making whenever they want that specific grocery run.
This project has no NHL dependency, no expansion fee, no county referendum. It is a grocery anchor and retail development moving on a normal commercial construction timeline, and it will likely be open and running well before anyone in Forsyth County finds out whether hockey comes back.
What already exists, no waiting required
While the arena renderings circulate, the corridor already has a working version of what The Gathering is trying to become. Cumming City Center, the 75-acre development behind Forsyth Central High School that Mayor Troy Brumbalow pushed as a main street Americana project, has been open and filling in for several years now. It has the Lou Sobh Amphitheater running a regular concert series next to a reflection pool, an 18-hole PuttTek mini golf course, a network of trails and boardwalk crossing the wetlands along Kelly Mill Branch, and roughly 14 restaurant spaces planned around it.
The tenant that best captures how this place actually functions day to day is Crooked Culture Brewing at 421 Vision Drive. Founders Patrick Leonard, who had brewed at Gate City Brewing in Roswell and Jekyll Brewing before going out on his own, and business partner Nick Estes opened the taproom in November 2023 with 14 beers made on site and a rooftop beer garden. It has become known locally for a standing Monday night Connect Four tournament against head brewer Geoff Gardner and Wednesday trivia, the kind of recurring, unglamorous routine that turns a new development into an actual neighborhood rather than a rendering.
What this means if you are just trying to keep track
The arena will keep making headlines because sports and public money are always a good story. But if you live in South Forsyth and want a read on how the area around Union Hill Road and Ronald Reagan Boulevard is actually going to change, watch the Whole Foods construction timeline and the Cumming City Center tenant list before you watch the NHL expansion calendar. One of those is moving on a predictable commercial schedule. The other is waiting on a league that has told you, on the record, that it is not in a hurry.
Mike Stevens tracks projects like this one because they shape what a street or a subdivision is worth long before a moving truck ever shows up. If you want the local read on how a specific pocket of South Forsyth is positioned as this corridor fills in, whether you are buying now or just keeping an eye on the market for later, Stevens Residential is a straightforward way to get it. Schedule a Free Market Consultation whenever the timing works for you.
