Western Broward County is making a quiet but consequential bet: build the density, and the rail will follow — and then make both stronger than either could be alone.

Metropica's Phase 2 Has Turned a Planning Vision Into a Construction Site

In April 2026, Urbanize Miami confirmed that construction had begun on Phase 2 of Metropica, the master-planned mixed-use development in Sunrise, Florida, anchored within a formally designated Transit Oriented Development (TOD) district. Developer Joseph Kavana's second phase — groundbreaking held September 30, 2025 — is the biggest expansion yet of a project that has been quietly maturing for a decade.

  • ~2,583 additional residential units are planned for Phase 2, on top of nearly 700 units already occupied in two completed towers.
  • 650,000 square feet of office space and 485,000 square feet of commercial space are also on the plan, alongside 480 hotel rooms.
  • The 65-acre site sits between Sawgrass Mills mall and Amerant Bank Arena — the home of the back-to-back Stanley Cup champion Florida Panthers — in one of the highest-traffic corridors in western Broward.
  • In April 2025, Metropica Development LLC donated 19 acres of land adjacent to the Sawgrass Expressway to the Florida Turnpike Authority, enabling a full-access interchange at Pat Salerno Drive that will serve both the growing development and the broader region.

This is no longer a rendering on a brochure. Phase 2 construction is active, and the density Broward's transit planners have long needed in this corridor is finally materializing in concrete and steel.

BCT's PREMO Plan Has the Network, the Mandate, and the Surtax to Back It Up

Broward County Transit (BCT) has spent the past three years translating its voter-approved 1% transportation surtax into something tangible: the Premium Mobility Plan, known as PREMO. The plan totals $4.3 billion over 15 years and proposes more than 200 new miles of premium transit — including 23.3 miles of light rail transit (LRT), 76 miles of bus rapid transit (BRT), 11.5 miles of commuter rail, and 100 miles of high-frequency bus service. BCT CEO and General Manager Coree Cuff Lonergan has been direct about the opportunity: the plan's first-phase light rail, a $1.25-billion fully elevated line connecting Fort Lauderdale–Hollywood International Airport, Port Everglades, and the Broward County Convention Center, would make BCT one of the true intermodal transit providers in the country.

  • The PREMO light rail Phase 1 is estimated at $1.25 billion and spans 3.5 miles with three stations, with a planned opening in 2028.
  • The longer 23.3-mile LRT network is designed to extend westward — toward corridors like Sawgrass Mills and the emerging Sunrise hub.
  • BCT issued a pre-advertisement for a Project Development and Environmental (PD&E) study and preliminary engineering procurement in November 2023, demonstrating that planning has moved from concept into the technical design phase.
  • The 1% transportation surtax, approved by Broward voters in 2018, provides the dedicated local funding stream that makes PREMO's federal funding applications credible.

BCT already carries 24.4 million annual riders across its 44 fixed routes — a system that reaches 4,800 stops across a 410-square-mile service area. That ridership base gives the agency both the political backing and the operational experience to graduate from buses to rail.

The TOD and the Rail Strengthen Each Other — If They Arrive Together

The honest question for western Broward is whether rail planning and urban development can stay close enough in time to reinforce each other. The history of South Florida transit is littered with projects that arrived too late to shape neighborhoods, or too early to find riders. What makes the Sunrise corridor genuinely different today is that the sequencing looks right. Metropica's Phase 2 construction is active now — meaning the residential and commercial density that justifies a rail stop is being built during the same planning window in which PREMO's environmental review and preliminary engineering are advancing. By the time PREMO's first light rail segment opens and extensions toward Sawgrass are engineered, Metropica could have thousands of residents who will be natural early adopters.

The City of Sunrise has reinforced this with planning work of its own: its Bicycle and Pedestrian Greenways and Trails Master Plan has been updated specifically to improve multimodal connectivity across the area, and the Sawgrass Expressway interchange redesign will reduce the car-dominated character of the district's perimeter while calming internal circulation. When a private developer donates land for transit-enabling infrastructure, when a city updates its active-transportation plan, and when a county's rail procurement moves through federal review simultaneously, it is reasonable to call that alignment — not accident.

Western Broward's Urban Future Is Already Under Construction

The version of Sunrise that exists when Metropica Phase 2 finishes will look nothing like the drive-through suburb of twenty years ago. Thousands of new residents will live within walking distance of two of Florida's top entertainment destinations, a future light rail stop, and a regional expressway rebuilt with multimodal access in mind. Broward County Transit will have a proven ridership base, a voter-funded capital program, and an urbanizing western anchor to justify the extension that PREMO's full light rail network envisions. The bet is not that transit will create this neighborhood — the neighborhood is already going up. The bet is that rail will show up soon enough to shape how its residents move, and that western Broward earns a genuine urban identity in the process. That is a bet worth making, and it is already paying early returns.