Something genuinely transformative is happening at the faded retail cathedrals of South Florida. Across Miami-Dade, Broward, and Palm Beach counties, developers are tearing down anchor stores and proposing to replace them with something the region has lacked for decades: actual urban neighborhoods.

South Florida's mall redevelopments are adding thousands of apartments with no transit to match

The Real Deal mapped the wave on July 1: more than a half-dozen shopping centers are slated for redevelopments that would add thousands of apartments alongside hotels, offices, and restaurants — a fundamental reshaping of how South Floridians might live. The instinct behind all of this is correct. South Florida desperately needs housing density, and converting zombie retail into walkable mixed-use is about as smart a use of land as the region has produced in a generation.

  • Fort Lauderdale's Galleria: GFO Investments has proposed nine 30-story towers, over 3,000 apartments, a 170-room hotel, and 30 restaurants.
  • Doral's Miami International Mall: Simon Property Group moving forward with an 896-unit apartment project on old Sears and JCPenney footprints.
  • The Live Local Act is fast-tracking these projects by bypassing local zoning objections.
  • Q2 2026 office leasing in Miami-Dade jumped nearly 45 percent year-over-year; average asking rents hit $67 a square foot, up nearly 57 percent from five years ago.

The transit network was never designed to serve this density, and no one in power is connecting those facts

Miami-Dade's Metrorail logged about 51,600 weekday riders in Q1 2026 — a rounding error for a county of 2.8 million people — and nearly every station outside downtown was built as a park-and-ride facility premised on suburban residents driving to the train. We are about to drop tens of thousands of car-dependent residents onto corridors that this system was never designed to serve at this density.

  • The Galleria sits well east of Brightline's Fort Lauderdale station with no fixed-rail connection.
  • Miami International Mall in Doral is about as far from a Metrorail station as you can get while still being in Miami-Dade County.
  • Building 896 apartments in Doral without transit access doesn't solve a housing problem — it creates a traffic problem.

Riders showed up by the thousands when a destination was placed near a station — planners should take note

On April 4, over 2,000 fans took Metrorail to Inter Miami's inaugural match at Miami Freedom Park's Nu Stadium, and the Miami International Airport Station saw same-day ridership surge more than 150 percent compared to the year prior. Systemwide Metrorail ridership rose more than 16 percent that day compared to the April 2025 average. The lesson is simple: build something people want to reach, put it near a station, and they will ride.

Developers have found the land and the capital — county commissioners have not demanded the trains

Mall redevelopments are the rare moment when a region gets to do land use planning from scratch on large parcels, but the Live Local Act fast-tracks the apartments while doing nothing to fast-track the buses or trains. The Broward County PREMO light rail concept, which aims to connect Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport with downtown Fort Lauderdale, is the kind of spine that could knit these new nodes together — but it's still in the planning stages. What South Florida's developers have not found — and what county commissioners in Miami-Dade and Broward have not demanded — is a genuine commitment to transit-oriented density rather than just density.

Building a neighborhood without a transit plan isn't urbanism. It's just vertical sprawl.