"It certainly took our breath away. It's far in excess of anything anyone has before proposed for the Galleria." Fort Lauderdale Mayor Dean Trantalis said that in October 2025, describing his own city's first look at what's coming to the mall that sits on Sunrise Boulevard, the road that forms Coral Ridge's southern boundary. Almost a year later, the plan he was reacting to has already changed at least twice, and the mechanism driving the project means neither he nor the neighbors around it get to vote on whichever version finally breaks ground.
If you live in Coral Ridge, you've watched the Galleria empty out for years. What you may not have clocked is that the redevelopment now moving through City Hall isn't really a single plan. It's a moving target, and the state law making it possible is specifically designed to keep it moving without the usual local checkpoints.
What's Actually Sitting on 31.5 Acres Right Now
Walk the Galleria today and it still reads as a working mall, just a thinner one. Macy's and Dillard's remain open. The Apple Store stays busy. A handful of restaurants still fill tables. But the food court that once anchored the center has shrunk, large stretches of the eastern wing sit vacant, and as of March 2026 occupancy across the property hovered around 60 percent. This is the version of the mall that made it a candidate for one of the largest redevelopment plans Fort Lauderdale has seen in years.
The property itself is 31.5 acres running along East Sunrise Boulevard toward the Intracoastal Waterway, in a shopping center that opened in 1954 as an open-air center and was enclosed in the 1980s. In its prime it carried Neiman Marcus, Lord & Taylor and Saks Fifth Avenue. Those names are long gone, and the site's decline over the past decade is what opened the door to the new ownership group now redrawing it.
A Plan That Has Already Changed Three Times
Keystone-Florida Property Holding Group had owned the mall since 1993. In the fall of 2025 it sold the property for a reported $73 million to a joint venture between Miami-based GFO Investments, founded by Russell Galbut, and Fort Lauderdale-based InSite Group, led by Ben Shmul, with Atlas Hill Real Estate and Prime Finance also involved. What's followed is a plan that has shifted with nearly every public appearance:
- In August 2025, before the sale had even fully registered locally, the joint venture filed initial plans with the city for a mixed-use complex split into two zones, Galleria East and Galleria West, together totaling roughly 3,144 rental units across nine 30-story towers designed by Arquitectonica, plus a 170-room hotel.
- On October 28, 2025, the developers and city officials held a town hall at the Coral Ridge Yacht Club that drew a standing-room-only crowd. The plan presented that night was described as roughly 2,000 residential units and two hotels totaling about 350 rooms, a noticeably different shape than what had been filed with the city just weeks earlier.
- By May 13, 2026, the developers had gone back to a version closer to the original filing. The FAA issued "Determination of No Hazard to Air Navigation" clearances for eight towers, labeled B1 through B8, each rising 342 feet, or about 30 stories, above ground level.
Layered on top of that, Mayor Trantalis has said the developers may be considering converting some of the rental units into condominiums to improve the project's finances. Chris Williams, president of the Coral Ridge Association and a longtime resident who remembers the humble strip center that stood on the site before the mall, has said publicly that he'd rather see it that way entirely, no rentals, all condos, paired with a redesign of the mall's east end near the old Jordan Marsh building, now the freestanding Dillard's, which he notes sits on land Dillard's owns outright rather than leases.
None of that is settled. It's a plan still being negotiated in real time, and that instability is the part of this story that gets flattened when it's reported as a fixed set of numbers.
Why the City Doesn't Get the Final Say
The reason the plan can keep shifting without a formal public vote comes down to the legal path the developers chose. The proposal was submitted under Florida's Live Local Act, a state law that lets residential projects bypass certain local zoning limits, including height, in exchange for including workforce housing. Under the act, a project like this one can match its height to the tallest existing building within one mile, which is how a shopping mall becomes a cluster of 342-foot towers without a rezoning fight.
The tradeoff on paper is affordability. Of the 3,144 units in the filed plan, 1,273 are designated workforce housing, and at least 40 percent of the total must go to households earning at or below 120 percent of the area median income. For a family of four in the neighborhoods surrounding the mall, the city put that 2025 income threshold at $96,200. Under the same statewide framework, that math can produce studio apartments renting for roughly $2,421 a month in Broward County, a number worth sitting with if you've pictured "workforce housing" as meaning inexpensive.
The bigger structural point is procedural. Mayor Trantalis has been blunt about what the Live Local Act removes from the process:
"Live Local pulled the rug out from under us. It ties our hands. It doesn't allow our neighbors a say in what is being built."
That's not political framing. It's a description of how the statute works. Projects that qualify under Live Local don't require the standard public hearings or city commission sign-off that would normally accompany a redevelopment of this scale. The city's Development Services Department is still reviewing whether the application checks the required statutory boxes, and Trantalis has said he's hopeful the outcome is a good one. But hope is a different thing than a vote, and residents showing up to town halls are participating in a conversation the law doesn't require the developers to have.
The Neighbors Who Keep Showing Up Anyway
That hasn't stopped Coral Ridge and the surrounding associations from engaging. Tim Hernandez, president of the Coral Ridge Country Club Estates Community Association, has said the neighborhood isn't reflexively opposed to redevelopment. "We're not NIMBYs, we're not anti-development, we want to see that property redeveloped," he told local reporters, before raising the concern that's dominated the pushback since: parking and traffic. Hernandez pointed to a plan that includes over 4,000 parking spaces, calling it a development built entirely around cars, one with "no alternative means for people to get around," a critique that lands differently in a neighborhood where East Sunrise Boulevard already carries heavy through-traffic toward the beach.
Developer Russell Galbut has pushed back on the traffic framing directly, arguing the mixed-use design reduces car dependence because residents would live, work and shop on the same property. Whether that holds up once thousands of new units are occupied is the kind of question that won't get answered until construction is well underway, if it happens at all.
What's Actually Locked In
Amid all the moving pieces, one detail has held steady. Wayfair confirmed in April 2026 that it will open its first large-format Florida store at the Galleria as part of the redevelopment, a two-level, roughly 94,000-square-foot store carrying furniture, decor, housewares and appliances suited to South Florida's indoor-outdoor living style. It's scheduled to open in late 2027. Unlike the tower count or the unit mix, that's a signed commitment rather than a filing that could be revised at the next town hall.
What to Watch From Here
The process still has real steps ahead of it: a revised development plan addressing traffic and infrastructure, additional city planning and commission review, and community benefit agreements meant to lock in whatever commitments on affordable units and public space survive the negotiation. Neighborhood associations have already organized follow-up meetings to track each revision.
For anyone in Coral Ridge, the useful takeaway isn't a specific tower count or unit total, because those have already proven unreliable from one announcement to the next. It's that this redevelopment is going to keep evolving in public view, largely outside the city's normal approval process, for at least the next several years. Wayfair's 2027 opening date is the one fixed point on the calendar so far. Everything else, including how many buildings eventually rise along East Sunrise Boulevard, is still being written.
If you're watching the Galleria's next chapter and wondering what it might mean for your own property, your street, or your timeline in the neighborhood, The Dinh Group has been tracking Coral Ridge closely for exactly these moments. Schedule your personalized consultation with Hanh to talk through what's actually changing around you and what it means for your plans.
