news
Birmingham Neighborhood Projects Follow Decades of Strategic Planning, Investment Patterns
Multiple housing and mixed-use efforts now underway follow established timelines for replacing older sites and adding residential units across several neighborhoods.
How we reported this
Construction timelines for projects such as the Star Uptown development and the Smithfield-College Hills-Graymont Choice Neighborhoods Initiative show how Birmingham is advancing residential and mixed-use plans that replace prior uses and add units over multi-year phases.
Star Uptown development on former hospital site
The Star Uptown project is a $340 million mixed-use district that replaces the former Carraway Hospital. Construction begins in Spring 2026, with the first 64 cottages and townhomes scheduled for residents by early 2027. This effort continues the pattern of redeveloping large institutional sites into housing and related uses.
SCG Choice Neighborhoods Initiative phases
The Smithfield-College Hills-Graymont Choice Neighborhoods Initiative plans 920 mixed-income family and senior apartments across seven phases running from 2024 to 2030. A new Social Innovation Center is listed for 2026 within those phases. The initiative extends earlier Choice Neighborhoods work aimed at coordinated housing and community facilities.
Additional single-family projects and regional grant
Shadowbrook added more than 50 single-family homes in the Pratt City neighborhood, marked by a recent ribbon cutting. Separately, the New Woodlawn Single-Family Homes project introduced 16 homes priced from the low $200s in a historic area east of downtown. In February 2026 Birmingham received a $2 billion seed act grant to convert the Western Corridor, also called Ensley Works, into a logistics and manufacturing hub, providing broader economic context for neighborhood-level housing activity.
These dated elements together illustrate how current neighborhood work rests on multi-year schedules and prior site conditions rather than isolated starts. Observers can track completion of the listed phases and the 2026 Social Innovation Center through public updates from the involved planning documents and local reporting.