Tuesday errands in Eastern Shores usually mean the same short trip across the bridge: park near Winn-Dixie, grab the TJ Maxx run if there's time, maybe a movie at iPic later, dinner on the water at Duffy's if the shrimp basket sounds right. The mall has looked like this, more or less, for as long as most residents can remember. What a lot of people crossing that bridge don't realize is that the entire 29-acre property under their feet has had a legally approved plan to become something else since November 2020.
That plan has a name, Uptown Harbour, and it has been through enough amendments, waiver requests, and steps in the approval process that it's easy to assume it's stalled for good. As of August 2026, that assumption is wrong. The Real Deal reported that Dezer Development's site plan application is sitting in front of the city right now, with a representative telling the outlet a vote is expected this year or early next. Six years after the zoning was approved, the paperwork is finally catching up to the renderings.
The Mall Has a Six-Year-Old Redevelopment Plan
Dezer Development, the Sunny Isles Beach firm run by father and son Michael and Gil Dezer, bought the Intracoastal Mall for $63.5 million in 2013. The Dezers are better known locally for towers like the Porsche Design Tower and the still-under-construction Bentley Residences, both a short drive north in Sunny Isles Beach.
Here's how slowly the mall's own transformation has actually moved:
| When | What happened |
|---|---|
| 2013 | Dezer Development buys the Intracoastal Mall site for $63.5 million |
| November 2020 | City Commission approves the Uptown Harbour development agreement and zoning changes in a 4-3 vote, then calls a revote with no date set |
| January 2021 | Development agreement recorded with Miami-Dade County, locking in the approved program |
| 2023 | Dezer files a Third Amended and Restated Letter of Intent to move toward site plan approval |
| August 2024 | Dezer formally asks the Planning and Zoning Board to approve the site plan plus 15 zoning waivers |
| August 2026 | Site plan still pending, with a city vote expected this year or early next |
That's six years since the zoning approval, and the site plan is still pending. If your mental model of Uptown Harbour is "they've been talking about this forever, nothing's changing," you've been mostly right for most of that timeline. What's different now is that the site plan itself, the document that actually lets Dezer pull building permits, is the piece currently in front of the city.
What "Redeveloped" Actually Means on Paper
Here's the part that surprises people who assume a mall redevelopment means a bigger, nicer mall. It doesn't.
The development agreement recorded with the city in January 2021 approved up to 2,000 multifamily residential units, up to 375,000 square feet of retail, 200,000 square feet of office space, and a 250-key hotel across eight buildings ranging from three to 48 stories, some of them paired towers sharing a single podium. City filings note that compared to an earlier 2015 entitlement on the same land, this approved program cuts the commercial square footage by 75 percent while keeping the residential unit count essentially the same.
Read that plainly: the retail footprint shrinks by three quarters, and the residential count stays put. What replaces the mall, if it gets built as approved, will function much more like a residential district with a strip of ground-floor shops than a mall upgrade. The plan also calls for a new canal cut through the middle of the property, connecting to a water taxi stop, plus more than 5.5 acres of open space and a waterfront promenade. As part of the original 2020 approval, Dezer also agreed to fund public improvements on site, including a police substation, a fire station, a community center, and roughly six acres of park space.
So the answer to "what's replacing my grocery store" isn't a shinier grocery store. It's several thousand new residents, a walkable canal-front promenade, and a much smaller commercial footprint than the current shopping center offers.
Traffic Questions Around the Project
The renderings that circulate online tend to show glassy towers and a sparkling canal. The public record also includes a traffic debate dating to the original 2020 hearings, when reviewers questioned whether the signals and turn lanes proposed for the site would be enough to keep a project with both a hotel and big-box retail from backing up traffic onto the drawbridge connecting Sunny Isles Beach and North Miami Beach.
Eastern Shores residents raised similar concerns directly. Claudia Gallegos, a board member at the Reef Club Condominium on the Eastern Shores side of the canal, told Biscayne Times she liked most of the Zyscovich-designed master plan except for the scale, suggesting the towers come down closer to 15 floors. She also pointed to the oceanfront towers in Sunny Isles Beach that sit largely empty outside peak season as a reason to be cautious about building at this height and density on a site with only one real road connection.
None of that killed the project. The plan has moved in stages, with waiver requests for building height, lot depth, and screening standards still in the approval process as of 2024.
What Actually Changes on Your Next Winn-Dixie Run
Right now, nothing. The Winn-Dixie, TJ Maxx and HomeGoods, Old Navy, Dollar Tree, iPic theater, and Duffy's are all still open and still the same tenants they've been for years. Even if the city approves the pending site plan on the timeline Dezer described to The Real Deal, that approval is a permitting milestone, not a groundbreaking date. Large phased projects like this typically move tenant by tenant and phase by phase rather than closing the whole property overnight.
For updates, watch the North Miami Beach Planning and Zoning Board and City Commission agendas directly. The actual mall you use today has already lived through this kind of slow transformation once. The iPic theater residents go to now started life as a General Cinema multiplex when the mall opened in 1987, cycled through Sunrise Cinemas and Frank Theatres over the following two decades, and was gutted and rebuilt as the iPic in 2015. The mall has always changed in increments. There's no reason to expect the next chapter to move any faster, even with a site plan finally on the table.
Eastern Shores has stayed quiet on purpose while the skyline just north of it went vertical. Whatever eventually replaces the Intracoastal Mall will change that dynamic more than anything else built nearby in the last decade. It just isn't happening this week, or likely this year.
If you live on the peninsula and want a plain, unhurried read on how a project this size tends to affect values on the surrounding canals once it actually starts moving, Vella Real Estate keeps this file open and up to date. Book an appointment with Andrea Tavella whenever the timing works for you.
