Drive down Sunset Drive on a Thursday night this August and the picture looks almost identical to last year. The AMC marquee is lit. Cars circle the LA Fitness lot around six. Kids spill out of GameTime clutching prize tickets, and on the corner that poured wine as Trattoria Sole for more than two decades, a backlit bar throws warm light onto the sidewalk past midnight. None of it looks like a demolition site. On paper, it should.
The Shops at Sunset Place has been South Miami's biggest real estate story since Midtown Development bought the aging outdoor mall for $65.5 million in 2021 and brought in London's Heatherwick Studio to redesign it. The plan the City Commission approved is not a renovation. It calls for seven towers between 12 and 33 stories, more than 1,500 residences, a 287-room hotel, a 1,300-seat movie theater, and nearly 150,000 square feet of new shops and restaurants on the same 10-acre footprint. Demolition was penciled in for the first quarter of 2026. As of this summer, it still had not started, with the project waiting on permits and condo presales to line up.
That gap between the announced schedule and the ground truth is the part worth sitting with if you already live here. It is not a story about a neighborhood in limbo. It is a story about two different clocks running at the same time, one attached to a decade-long tower project and one attached to everything residents actually use on a Tuesday, and only one of those clocks has slipped.
What's Still Standing Inside the Mall
The coverage of Sunset Place tends to describe the site as reduced to a scant few holdouts. Walk the property and the list is longer than that framing suggests. Still open and operating as of this year:
- AMC Theatres, the multiplex that anchored the original 1999 mall
- LA Fitness
- GameTime, the arcade and entertainment venue
- Barnes & Noble
- Splitsville, the bowling and entertainment concept
Tea & Poets, a small café that built its own following independent of mall foot traffic, has also held on through the ownership change and the demolition announcement, run by an owner who has watched the property's rise and fall from the inside. None of this means the redevelopment isn't real. It means the interim years are more populated than the headlines about a stalled demolition permit would lead a resident to expect.
The Corner That Didn't Wait on a Permit
The most telling detail sits just off the mall property, at the intersection of Sunset Drive, Dorn Avenue, and US 1. Trattoria Sole held that corner for more than twenty years before closing, and the space did not sit empty. Flight West Miami quietly opened there in mid-May 2026 and held its formal grand opening in July, bringing live-fire cooking and a whiskey program built around roughly 350 spirits to a location South Miami had been watching for over a year. The kitchen is led by Executive Chef Juan Suazo, who trained under Chef Santiago Gomez of Cantina La Veinte, Tacology, and Palo Santo before Gomez handed him the line. The centerpiece is a Mibrasa charcoal oven that turns out a 32-day dry-aged ribeye and charred octopus with smoked chickpea hummus, with whiskey worked into glazes, sauces, and even the ice cream.
A few blocks away, Bored Cuban opened at 5812 Sunset Drive in March, its third location and first in South Miami. Founder Eric Castellanos timed the ribbon cutting for 305 Day, calling the opening a full-circle moment in the neighborhood near his own alma mater. Neither business waited for a demolition permit to clear before betting on this stretch of Sunset Drive. Two long-running staples, Deli Lane and Sunset Tavern, are following the same logic in reverse: rather than closing when construction eventually reaches their block, both are relocating a block west into space the property owner is redeveloping specifically to keep them open.
Announced Timeline vs. Where Things Actually Stand
| Milestone | Original Target | Status as of Mid-2026 |
|---|---|---|
| Demolition begins | Q1 2026 | Not yet started, pending permits and presales |
| Phase one (streets, condo-hotel) | 2029 | On the developer's stated timeline |
| Full project completion | 2035 | Unchanged |
| AMC, LA Fitness, GameTime, Barnes & Noble, Splitsville | N/A | Confirmed open and operating |
The slip in the first line matters more than it looks. A demolition that hasn't begun by summer means the ten-year build-out clock effectively resets forward from whenever the first permit clears, not from the date on the original press release. For anyone weighing what the neighborhood looks like in three or five years, the honest answer is that the mall's transformation is still mostly ahead of it, not behind it.
The Calendar That Never Missed a Date
While the tower project waited on paperwork, the parts of South Miami that don't require a demolition permit kept running exactly on schedule. SOMI ArtFest returned to downtown as a free juried show on February 21 and 22, 2026, drawing more than 100 artists from across the United States and Canada working in painting, photography, sculpture, and jewelry. Fourth of July at Palmer Park, at 6100 SW 67th Avenue, ran its usual 5 p.m. to 9:30 p.m. slot with fireworks at nine, untouched by anything happening on the western edge of downtown.
The City of South Miami also just wrapped the second year of Taste of SoMi, a month-long promotion running July 1 through 31 that paired curated menus at more than 20 local restaurants with retail promotions at another 20-plus shops. Participating restaurants included Bored Cuban, Amsterdam Falafel Shop, Kitchen 57, Old Lisbon, Noe Sushi Bar, Rice Mediterranean Kitchen, and La Placita, with dinner menus priced between $45 and $65 and quick-service spots offering 10 to 15 percent off. On the retail side, boutiques like Isabel Fine Home Accessories, South Miami Jewelers, and Si Belle French Boutique ran their own July-only offers. Mayor Javier Fernández described the program as a chance for the community to come together around the businesses that define the city, a framing that reads less like a press release and more like someone who watched the event's first year work well enough to expand it into a second.
None of these dates moved because a demolition permit is sitting on someone's desk. The South Miami Farmers' Market, set up in front of the library on Sunset Drive, is the plainest example. It's a small market by design, drawing produce from more than 15 Florida farms, and it runs every Saturday from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m., year-round, with SNAP and EBT accepted and doubled at the register. It has no reason to appear in redevelopment coverage because there's nothing dramatic to report. It's simply still there, on the same schedule it's kept for years.
What This Actually Means If You Live Here
Put the two timelines side by side and the real story of South Miami this year is not decline and it is not a construction crisis. It's that the neighborhood's daily rhythm was never dependent on the mall in the first place. The businesses residents actually use for a Tuesday dinner or a Saturday morning market run, the annual events that anchor a family's calendar, and the new restaurants willing to bet on a storied corner have all kept moving on their own clock, regardless of whether the seven towers break ground this quarter or next year.
That distinction is worth something concrete if you're weighing your own next few years on this street. A stalled demolition permit is not evidence that downtown South Miami is losing momentum. It's evidence that the momentum here was never sitting inside the mall's parking structure to begin with.
If you're thinking about what any of this means for a specific property in South Miami, whether you're watching this corridor as an owner or considering a move into it, Alive Sherman has been working this market long enough to read what's signal and what's just a headline. Book an appointment and let's talk about your address specifically.
