Knoxville has finally found a developer for the scorched, decades-vacant McClung Warehouses site along West Jackson Avenue, city officials confirmed, though the builder's identity and the project's exact scope remain under wraps for now. The roughly three-acre tract, sitting between Gay Street and North Broadway, has sat empty since fire tore through it in 2007 and again in 2014, leaving Knoxville to spend years and millions of dollars clearing and preparing the land for redevelopment.
The city and the Knoxville Community Development Corporation are now working with the unnamed developer to finalize an agreement, according to the Knoxville News Sentinel. Knoxville plans to share full project details, including the developer's name, building scale, financial incentives, and housing unit count, by the end of 2026. The project area includes the former warehouses site on the north side of West Jackson Avenue's 500 block, a single lot at 512 W. Jackson Ave., and the public parking lot at 401 W. Jackson Ave.
A Site Defined by Fire and Litigation
The McClung name traces back to 1893, when C.M. McClung & Company, a wholesale hardware enterprise founded by Calvin M. McClung, began operating out of the site, eventually expanding across multiple brick buildings that stood for nearly a century, according to the City of Knoxville. That industrial legacy gave way to blight after a three-alarm fire tore through the complex on Feb. 7, 2007, destroying three buildings and leaving only two historic structures standing after high winds carried embers across downtown, per WBIR. Several firefighters were injured and a fire engine was destroyed in the overnight blaze.
A second major fire struck the remaining structures on Feb. 1, 2014, and city officials determined afterward that what was left posed a risk of cascading structural failure. The blighted remnants were demolished later that month, with KCDC contracting the roughly $127,000 demolition, covered by insurance, per the same WBIR report. The two fires left the site as the notorious eyesore many longtime Knoxvillians remember, per the seed reporting.
Getting the land into public hands took its own fight. Knoxville acquired six West Jackson Avenue parcels for $1.45 million in July 2013 after settling a long-running lawsuit with bankruptcy trustee representatives for former property owner Mark Saroff, who had purchased the vacant warehouses in 1993 for $1 and resisted city condemnation efforts before entering bankruptcy, according to the Knoxville News Sentinel's 2013 archive. Knoxville has since acquired all the properties within the current project area, and city spending on the site has reached roughly $2.5 million.
Cleaning Up a Century of Industrial Use
Before any vertical construction could begin, the land needed environmental remediation. Site assessments completed for an EPA brownfield cleanup grant report in September 2019 identified soil contaminants including arsenic, lead, cobalt, manganese, and petroleum vapors left behind by more than a century of industrial uses, according to a report from S&ME, Inc. Those uses reportedly included an auto garage, a woodworking shop, a blacksmith shed, and railroad freight operations that once occupied the site.
Public Input Shaped the Vision
City leaders sought community feedback before pursuing a developer. A public input report published in March 2024, following a 300-participant open house held at The Standard on West Jackson Avenue in November 2023, showed support for a walkable, bike-friendly mixed-use space combining housing with ground-floor retail, per the City of Knoxville. Knoxville City Council had voted the following month, in April 2024, to transfer eight parcels totaling roughly four acres along West Jackson Avenue to KCDC, clearing the governance path for the agency to assemble that input and launch a formal developer search, per WBIR's coverage of the council vote.
Rebekah Jane Justice, Knoxville's chief of urban design and development, told Knox News in 2023 that the land would likely be redeveloped with a mixed-use project heavy on housing. That vision aligns with a broader citywide need: Knoxville has identified a requirement for an additional 6,000 to 8,000 housing units by 2029, according to the seed reporting.
KCDC's Formal Search and a Landmark Framing
KCDC issued a formal Request for Qualifications in June 2025 seeking a master developer to redevelop the 3.4-acre Jackson Avenue site into a mixed-use residential and retail community, per Vendor Registry's posting of the solicitation. KCDC has since highlighted the project as a landmark effort during its 90th anniversary milestone, linking it to other ongoing municipal redevelopment work like the St. Mary's Hospital townhome development, according to KCDC. The agency was founded in 1936 as the original Knoxville Housing Authority.
KCDC's own materials note that the 3.4-acre site sits within a 10-minute walk of Knoxville's multi-use stadium, Market Square, and World's Fair Park, positioning it at a key junction between downtown and adjacent historic neighborhoods. Knoxville and KCDC are advancing several other redevelopment efforts across the city at the same time, including a north waterfront redevelopment plan aiming to connect World's Fair Park, the riverfront, and the University of Tennessee at Knoxville campus. KCDC also continues searching for a developer for the south Knoxville landing of a future pedestrian bridge that would connect South Knoxville and the UT Knoxville campus.
For now, the identity of the McClung site's chosen developer, along with the precise building scale, financial incentives, and exact housing unit count, remains confidential. Knoxville has said it intends to present the full agreement to the public by the end of 2026, closing out a chapter that began with two fires and years of legal wrangling over a stretch of West Jackson Avenue long regarded as a downtown eyesore.
