Newington residents have given formal approval for the redevelopment of one of the Seacoast’s most prominent commercial properties. At a special town meeting on May 30, 2026, voters passed three articles in support of a tax increment financing district that will fund $9 million in public infrastructure improvements tied to the Seacoast Landing development. The vote clears the last major local hurdle for Torrington Properties’ plan to demolish the shuttered Mall at Fox Run and replace it with a mixed-use retail destination anchored by Costco Wholesale.
The decision, reported by NHPR in partnership with the Granite State News Collaborative, marks the formal beginning of what developers describe as a roughly $500 million transformation of one of the Seacoast’s most valuable commercial corridors.
What Voters Approved
The special town meeting was convened specifically to address the TIF district, which is the financial mechanism Torrington Properties and the town of Newington need to make the Seacoast Landing infrastructure work financially. Voters approved three separate articles related to the district.
A TIF district, or tax increment financing district, allows a municipality to capture the future increase in property tax revenue generated by a new development and redirect that revenue to pay back infrastructure investment. In Newington’s case, the town will use the TIF mechanism to fund $9 million worth of public infrastructure upgrades in the vicinity of the project, including road improvements and utilities. As the Seacoast Landing development generates new taxable value, a portion of that growth goes toward repaying the infrastructure bond rather than flowing into the general fund.
It is a financing tool that cities and towns across New Hampshire and the country have used to catalyze large-scale private development. By agreeing to the TIF structure, Newington’s voters essentially agreed that the future tax revenue generated by Seacoast Landing is worth redirecting toward the infrastructure needed to support it.
What Seacoast Landing Will Be
Torrington Properties, led by founder and CEO Jay Bisognano, has been assembling the pieces of this project for nearly five years. Between June 2021 and December 2024, the company spent a combined $66.1 million to acquire the Mall at Fox Run, including the attached Sears, Macy’s, and JCPenney anchor spaces, and the adjacent 15-acre Newington Park Shopping Center, which had housed tenants including Savers and JoAnn Fabrics before closing.
The Mall at Fox Run opened in 1983, making it 43 years old at the time of its planned demolition. It represents a generation of American retail built around the enclosed mall format, a model that has struggled across the country as consumer habits shifted toward e-commerce and open-air retail.
Seacoast Landing is the name of the replacement project. It will not be a new enclosed mall. Instead, Bisognano has described a mixed-use retail destination designed for the way people shop and spend time in 2026. Costco Wholesale has committed to anchoring the project, and a second, unnamed national retailer has also committed to a space. Those two tenants would be positioned closest to the Spaulding Turnpike and together account for nearly half of the site’s proposed total square footage.
The full Seacoast Landing development is expected to cost approximately $500 million when complete, a figure that reflects both the scale of the demolition and construction work and the commercial value of the Newington market.
Why This Development Matters for the Seacoast
Newington is a small town: its year-round population hovers around 800 residents, making it one of the least populous municipalities in New Hampshire. But it punches well above its weight commercially. The town sits at the intersection of the Spaulding Turnpike and U.S. Route 4, adjacent to the Fox Point industrial area and directly across from Portsmouth. Its commercial tax base has historically been substantial relative to its size.
The loss of the Mall at Fox Run as a functioning retail destination created a gap that Newington and regional planners have been trying to fill for years. The mall’s anchor tenants departed in waves beginning in the 2010s as the broader department store sector contracted. By the time Torrington Properties began its acquisition, the mall had become a largely vacant structure consuming a strategically valuable piece of the Seacoast commercial landscape.
Costco’s presence in the redevelopment is particularly notable. The warehouse retailer has an existing New Hampshire location in Concord and has been identified as the second NH Costco in planning since earlier this spring. Costco locations generate significant traffic, and their placement near the Spaulding Turnpike maximizes accessibility for shoppers traveling from Portsmouth, the Seacoast communities, and southern Maine. The second national anchor, while unnamed, carries similar strategic logic.
For Newington, the TIF structure means the town does not need to fund the $9 million infrastructure investment out of its existing tax base. The bet is that the new development will create enough new taxable value that the increment, the difference between what the property generates today and what it will generate post-development, covers the debt service on the infrastructure bond and ultimately adds to the town’s long-term fiscal picture.
The Road to May 30
The journey from Torrington’s first acquisition to the May 30 vote has been methodical. Real estate acquisitions at this scale require years of due diligence, environmental review, and planning work before anything visible happens on the ground. Bisognano’s team spent the years between 2021 and 2025 completing the property assembly, evaluating the development program, securing anchor commitments, and negotiating the TIF framework with town officials.
The approval process itself was largely uncontroversial. While there are always questions about traffic, retail saturation, and the use of TIF financing in any large development, Seacoast Landing did not generate the kind of organized opposition that sometimes accompanies commercial projects of this scale. The May 30 town meeting vote was a clean approval of all three articles.
Demolition of the existing structures is expected to begin in 2026, though a precise timeline for the sequence of construction phases has not been publicly announced. The $500 million total project cost suggests that Seacoast Landing will take multiple years to build out fully, and the two anchor tenants will likely open before the full site is complete.
Context: NH’s Commercial Landscape Is Shifting
The Seacoast Landing project is a piece of a broader story unfolding across New Hampshire’s commercial real estate market. The state’s proximity to Massachusetts, its lack of a sales tax, and its growing population have made it an attractive target for national retailers looking to expand in the Northeast.
The same conditions that made Newington attractive to Torrington Properties are drawing attention to other parts of the state. In the North Country, developers are looking at alternative commercial concepts for underperforming retail corridors. In Nashua, a major casino hotel expansion at the Sheraton Nashua is heading toward Planning Board approval, reflecting an entirely different form of commercial investment in a gateway city.
What ties these projects together is a recognition that the commercial land uses that defined New Hampshire’s suburban corridors in the 1980s and 1990s are giving way to new forms. The enclosed mall is being replaced by warehouse retail, mixed-use destinations, and experience-driven concepts. The transition is sometimes awkward and slow, as years of vacant anchor space attests, but the Newington vote is evidence that the replacement cycle is real and that communities are willing to use the tools available to accelerate it.
For Costco shoppers currently making the drive to Concord, a Newington location represents a dramatically shorter trip and a more convenient access point to one of the country’s most popular retailers. That practical reality is what made Seacoast Landing a viable project from the beginning, and the May 30 vote is what makes it a project that can now actually be built.
For related coverage, see our reporting on $9.3 Million in Federal Grants Lands in Rural New Hampshire.
