Ask a longtime Redding resident where to go to run errands and you'll hear "Hilltop" before the question is finished. Mt. Shasta Mall, the shopping centers ringing it, decades of muscle memory. For most of Redding's recent history, Hilltop Drive was the answer.
It still gets you a lot done. But it is no longer where the city's newest square footage is landing. Walk through the last four years of Redding retail news and the pattern is hard to miss: the biggest new-construction projects have clustered three miles south, at the I-5 and Bonnyview interchange, while Hilltop Drive has spent its growth differently, on renovation and restaurants rather than new acreage. Meanwhile, a dead big-box building on the north side of town came back to life as something Redding hadn't had before. Three corridors, three different kinds of change, and none of them look like what the old mental map predicts.
The Bonnyview Corner Got Crowded First
When Costco left its longtime Dana Drive location, it didn't go far, but it went south. The new store opened at 4805 Bechelli Lane in November 2022, inside the River Crossing Marketplace near South Bonnyview Road and I-5. At 152,000 square feet, it's roughly 30,000 square feet larger than the Dana Drive building it replaced, with a bigger pharmacy, a tire center, and a gas station added to the footprint.
That was the first domino. The bigger one followed close behind: Churn Creek Marketplace, a roughly 150,000-square-foot shopping center built at the northeast corner of the same I-5/Bonnyview interchange. Its anchor list reads like a checklist of what Redding didn't have close together before: Save Mart, Ross Dress for Less, Petco, Ulta Beauty, Five Below, Daiso, Starbucks, In-N-Out Burger, Panda Express, Les Schwab Tire, an express car wash, and a Mechanics Bank branch. The developers picked the site in part because roughly 697 new homes are under construction nearby, and the corner sits close enough to I-5 to pull from Anderson, Cottonwood, and Shasta Lake as well as Redding proper.
Put those two projects side by side and you get more than 300,000 square feet of retail construction landing on one interchange in the space of a few years. That's not an incremental addition to an existing shopping district. That's a new one, built where the freeway crosses a road that used to be mostly residential and open land.
Hilltop Drive Traded Square Footage for a Kitchen
Hilltop Drive hasn't stood still, but its version of growth looks different on paper. Barnes & Noble relocated within the Hilltop Shopping Center in January 2024, an updated store with an expanded café, not a new building on new ground. It's a refresh of a tenant Redding already had, in a space Redding already had.
The more interesting move on Hilltop is Lucente Cucina, an Italian restaurant with hand-rolled pasta, house-made sauces, and an in-house butchery that opened this year inside the Holiday Inn at 1900 Hilltop Drive. The Redding Chamber of Commerce held a ribbon-cutting there on June 25, and Chamber president Todd Jones framed it as the kind of addition that "gives both residents and visitors another reason to gather, connect and support local business." What makes it notable isn't just the food. It's that the restaurant arrived as part of a larger hotel renovation, meaning the investment on this stretch of Hilltop went into rebuilding what already existed rather than paving something new.
That's the real distinction between the two corridors. Bonnyview is adding acreage. Hilltop is adding depth inside buildings that were already standing. If you're used to thinking of Hilltop as the place that gets bigger every year, the more accurate read now is that it's the place that gets renovated.
The Old Shopko Got a New Kind of Tenant
The most telling change in Redding retail this year didn't happen on either of those corridors. It happened in the empty Shopko building on Lake Boulevard, in north Redding, where Grange Co-op opened its doors with a grand opening celebration running August 15 through 17, 2025.
Grange Co-op isn't a general merchandise replacement for a general merchandise store. It's a farm, ranch, and pet supply retailer headquartered in southern Oregon since 1934, and the Redding location is its eighth store and only its second in California. The 28,000-square-foot space includes a dog wash, work and western wear, garden supplies, and Rogue Feed, the company's own private-label livestock feed. Marketing manager Jason Wall described the run-up to opening as years in the making, pointing to the company's presence at the Haven Humane Doggy Dash, local holiday parades, and junior livestock auctions before the store ever opened. CEO Neil Itzen put it more simply: "Redding feels like home."
That's a category shift, not just a tenant shift. Shopko sold a little bit of everything to everyone. Grange Co-op sells feed, tack, and fencing to a specific customer, and it's backing that up with more than $60,000 invested in youth livestock auctions across Shasta, Tehama, and Trinity counties since 2021, plus a sponsorship of the Redding Rodeo. A building built for one kind of shopping trip is now built for a completely different one.
Reading the New Map
Line the three corridors up and the pattern holds:
| Corridor | What Opened | Size | What It Signals |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bonnyview & I-5 | Costco relocation, Churn Creek Marketplace | 152,000 sq ft + ~150,000 sq ft | New construction, built to serve growing residential areas nearby |
| Hilltop Drive | Lucente Cucina (inside Holiday Inn), Barnes & Noble relocation | No new footprint added | Renovation and hospitality investment inside existing buildings |
| Lake Boulevard | Grange Co-op in former Shopko | 28,000 sq ft | Adaptive reuse, general merchandise replaced by a farm and ranch specialty store |
None of this changes what Hilltop Drive is good for. It's still where the mall is, still where a lot of daily errands get done. But if your mental map still treats Hilltop as the only growing part of town, you're going to keep driving past a corner at Bonnyview that now has a Costco, an In-N-Out, an Ulta, and a Ross within a few hundred feet of each other. And if you've been meaning to check out the new Italian place everyone mentioned this summer, it's not on a strip mall. It's inside a hotel you've probably driven past a hundred times without thinking twice.
Redding didn't get bigger in one direction. It got more specific in three. The south end is where the new construction is happening because that's where the rooftops are going up. Hilltop is investing in what's already there. And the north end just proved that an empty big-box building doesn't have to sit empty, or come back as another version of what it used to be. Sometimes it comes back as a feed store with a dog wash, because that's what the neighborhood actually asked for.
If you're weighing whether a particular corner of Redding fits how you actually live, day to day errands included, that's a conversation worth having before you start comparing listings. Monet Templeton has spent close to two decades reading this town's changes, block by block, and is glad to talk through what a given neighborhood looks like right now, not just what it looked like when the map was last updated in your head. Book an appointment or request a home valuation whenever you're ready to talk specifics.
