Seven years ago in homey, sleepy South Miami, quirky politics and elected leaders and longtime residents leery of change combined to kill a multi-million-dollar chance to rescue the sliding fortunes of Sunset Drive, the town’s signature main street.
The city commission, in a 4-1 vote, spurned a developer’s plan to rebuild the failing Sunset Place mall with a high-density mix of high-rise apartments, public spaces and new shopping and dining spots. It was a decision South Miami soon came to regret.
Once a shining star in the suburban Miami firmament, South Miami’s cozy and eminently walkable downtown has been paying the price ever since. Shops and restaurants around the nearly deserted mall, which one resident calls “kind of creepy,” struggle to stay open amid a dispiriting landscape of vacant storefronts and scant foot traffic.
But it’s a new day in South Miami, and it might just see both Sunset Place and the town’s city hall complex dramatically transformed.
This month, the town of around 11,000 people and its revamped leadership embraced a pair of major, large-scale redevelopment proposals intended to put South Miami back on the map, including a plan by new owners of Sunset Place that calls for demolishing the obsolete mall and replacing it with, yes, a high-density mix of high-rise apartments, public spaces and new shopping and dining spots.