If you've lived near downtown South Miami for more than a year, you've heard the headline version of this story: Sunset Place is getting torn down, seven towers are going up in its place, and the London design firm Heatherwick Studio is turning a dead mall into a walkable village. The city commission approved it unanimously back in October 2024. Demolition was supposed to start in the first quarter of this year.
Here's what the headlines left out. As of this summer, demolition still hadn't begun. The mall's biggest tenants, AMC Theatres, LA Fitness, GameTime, Barnes & Noble, and Splitsville, are all still open for business on the same roughly 10-acre site the press releases described as nearly empty. If your mental picture of Sunset Drive right now includes fencing and dust, that picture is a year or two early.
Meanwhile, something did change. It just happened a block away from where everyone was looking.
The permit that's still sitting on someone's desk
The redevelopment plan itself hasn't gotten smaller. Midtown Development bought the aging outdoor mall in 2021 and brought in Heatherwick Studio to replace it with seven towers ranging from 12 to 33 stories, more than 1,500 residences, a 287-room hotel, a 1,300-seat theater, and close to 150,000 square feet of new shops and restaurants. The first phase, streets and a condo-hotel, isn't projected to open until 2029. The full build-out could run a decade.
What's slipped is the start date. The plan called for demolition in Q1 2026. Trade coverage from midsummer confirmed the permits and condo presales the project depends on were still pending, which means the wrecking ball that was supposed to arrive by spring hadn't shown up by the time most of this year's restaurant openings had already happened. The design intent behind the eventual rebuild is still worth knowing: Heatherwick's approach replaces the mall's inward-facing parking-garage layout with a real street grid connecting back to Sunset Drive, an idea the firm has described as bringing back streets. That's the long-term plan. It just isn't this year's plan.
For a resident, the practical takeaway is almost boring: the corner you already know is still the corner you know. The dramatic version of this story is still years away.
Where the actual change landed
While the mall's calendar stalled, three different addresses on Sunset Drive quietly changed hands.
| Restaurant | Address | What happened |
|---|---|---|
| Bored Cuban | 5812 Sunset Drive | Opened March 5 with a ribbon-cutting tied to 305 Day, its third location and the first inside walking distance of downtown residents |
| Flight West | 5894 Sunset Drive | Opened quietly in mid-May, held its grand opening in July, live-fire cooking and a whiskey program built around roughly 350 spirits |
| Delicias de España | 5600 Sunset Drive | Returned to Sunset Drive after a 2018 fire closed its original flagship, joining existing Bird Road and Dadeland locations |
Bored Cuban's arrival matters less for the food than for the geography. It's the first of the brand's three South Florida locations sitting inside the everyday walking radius for people who live between Red Road and US 1, rather than a drive across town.
Flight West is the more surprising of the two openings. The space held Trattoria Sole for more than twenty years, anchoring the intersection of Sunset Drive, Dorn Avenue, and US 1 before finally closing. What replaced it doesn't read like a neighborhood replacement restaurant. Executive Chef Juan Suazo, who trained under chef Santiago Gomez of Cantina La Veinte, Tacology, and Palo Santo before working stints at Kyu and Komodo, built a menu around a Mibrasa charcoal oven turning out a 32-day dry-aged ribeye and charred octopus with smoked chickpea hummus. It's the kind of restaurant format South Miami residents have gotten used to driving north for, not walking to.
The real story of Sunset Drive this year isn't the demolition. It's two clocks running at once: a redevelopment behind its own schedule, and a neighborhood that kept moving without waiting for it.
Delicias de España's return carries a longer backstory. The Spanish market, bakery, and café closed its original Bird Road and Red Road flagship after a 2018 fire and spent years promising a comeback. Construction on the Sunset Drive space stalled visibly enough that neighboring tenants told local reporters they hadn't seen anyone working there in months. Work resumed, stalled again, and the location finally opened this year, joining the brand's existing Bird Road and Dadeland outposts.
What's moving, not closing
Not every business caught up in the mall's construction footprint is disappearing. Deli Lane and Sunset Tavern, both fixtures since 1988, sit close enough to the Sunset Place site to be affected by the surrounding redevelopment, but the building owner is redeveloping space just to their west so both can relocate rather than close permanently. If you've built a routine around either one, the move is a block, not a neighborhood change.
The city's own plans are running on a parallel track. A companion project called the Link at SoMi will eventually replace the municipal complex at 6130 Sunset Drive, the address that currently hosts City Hall, the police department, the library, and Design Review Board meetings, with a five-story civic building and two 15-story residential towers holding 670 workforce housing units. That's on the same extended timeline as the mall rebuild, which means anyone who deals with the city on a regular basis should expect two separate rounds of relocation notices over the next several years, not one.
The calendar that never moved
Here's the part that actually tells you how disruptive any of this has been so far: none of it touched the events residents actually show up for.
- SOMI ArtFest returned 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, 6100 SW 67th Avenue, ran its usual 5 p.m. to 9:30 p.m. slot with fireworks at 9, sitting well outside the construction footprint.
- Taste of SoMi wrapped its second July with an expanded retail lineup alongside the usual dining promotions.
- The South Miami Farmers Market, in front of the library on Sunset Drive, kept its normal Saturday schedule year-round, drawing produce from more than 15 Florida farms and accepting SNAP and EBT at the register.
None of these dates moved because a demolition permit is still sitting on someone's desk. The geography explains why. Every one of these recurring gatherings sits east of Red Road or south of Sunset Drive, outside the zone where the mall rebuild and the municipal rebuild will eventually collide.
What this actually tells you
Put the pieces together and the honest version of this year in downtown South Miami looks nothing like the demolition headlines. The Sunset Place rebuild is real, and eventually it will reshape a meaningful chunk of downtown. But it's running behind its own announced schedule, and the tenants inside it, from the movie theater to the bowling alley, are still open today. The parts of the neighborhood that don't depend on permits, a farmers market, a July art fest, a fireworks show, a couple of new restaurants that opened on their own clock, kept moving the entire time.
If you live near Sunset Drive, the read for the next year or two is simple. The corner you remember is still mostly the corner you remember, with a few new places worth walking to and a couple of long-running ones moving a block instead of closing. The bigger change is still genuinely years out. When it arrives, it's designed to build around what's already there rather than erase it.
If you're thinking about what any of this means for a home near downtown South Miami, whether that's a new restaurant changing the walkability of a block or a mixed-use district eventually rising nearby, The MIA Home Group knows this stretch of Sunset Drive block by block. Let's Connect and talk through what it actually means for your address.
