“North Roosevelt ain’t pretty. It’s a two-mile, paved-over, 1970-ish strip mall with acres of pavement, old buildings and a bazillion curb cuts. Yeah, the view across the water ain’t too shabby, but that commercial and retail side?

“How much uglier could North Roosevelt get if we lifted height restrictions and allowed increased density? I’m sure when Publix completes its new retail center on the old Searstown property, it’s going to be a huge improvement. But I’d be a lot happier if Publix had had to add two or three floors of housing on top of its planned razing and rebuilding.”

I wrote those two paragraphs March 15, 2025. After spending a chunk of last week doing medical stuff in Coral Gables, I’m convinced that the City of Key West and Publix can create a once-in-a-generation urban retail oasis for the redevelopment of Key Plaza, even though we’ll have to live with “good enough” for Searstown.

Publix knows how to do it. The city has regulations in place to do it. There’s wicked big space to do it in, which means we don’t have to build as high as congested Coral Gables does. There’s time to reshape the preliminary designs. How about we trade the easy-to-build 1970s asphalt strip mall for a 21st-century mixed-use retail center that focuses not on parking lots but on “placemaking”? (More on that buzzword later.)

Pretty much all we have to do is say, “Hang on a minute,” rather than signing off on the first design renderings we see. Those Key Plaza visualizations are just on someone’s “copy-and-paste” clipboard with a couple of tweaks to sorta indicate Key West. They’re a start; they don’t have to be the end. The city can do better. Publix already does better in mainland urban centers like Coral Gables. Heck, even the new Tavernier Publix is better.

There IS much to like about the preliminary plans, which also encompass the retail strip that now faces Kennedy. Stores face the center and are around the edges of the huge property with parking in the middle. Landscaping around the outside edges and along the surrounding streets will do much to mitigate the massive buildings. The colors are neutral sand and taupe, none of the bright white and faded teal green remains. If built with no changes, the new design will be an improvement, although I’d like to see more Key West “look and feel” and a little less of the “Brutalist.”

We’re unlikely to see housing with the Key Plaza redevelopment, which is a shame. Patrick Wright, the city’s Growth Management Director, told The Citizen this week that the city doesn’t have enough Building Permit Allocations left to incorporate housing in Key Plaza. In Wright’s memo to the city, he wrote, “This will continue to be a limiting factor unless the modification of a hurricane evacuation model and new units are advocated for at the state level.”

And I am definitely not in favor of increasing the hurricane evacuation time.

Key Plaza: It’s not too late to showcase this project

In Coral Gables and in thousands of new and retrofitted shopping areas around the world, developers have shifted from asphalt and parking to street fronts. Parking is behind, under and on top. Housing is incorporated, Green space means walkable paths, places to linger in the shade. Green space doesn’t mean a couple of buttonwoods in a planter separating parking spaces. It doesn’t mean landscaping along the road to hide the mess behind. (Although I admit that concept made Winn-Dixie’s still-a-strip-mall Overseas Market at least look better.)

Placemaking is about creating community centers where folks go to do something more than pick up bread and milk. The word has been used since at least the 1950s. Placemaking made its way into retail development in the 1970s when Americans fell in love with enclosed malls. There’s not a boomer or Xer alive who hasn’t answered “going to the mall with my friends” for Friday night plans. Enclosed malls replaced the sterile, car-focused strip malls that plague North Roosevelt.

In the 1980s and ’90s, developers turned away from those monolithic, inward-facing, asphalt-surrounded malls and toward open-air, pedestrian-friendly, multi-use community centers. Today developers eager to encourage foot traffic and return shoppers embrace designs that start with a sense of place and community. Going shopping becomes a pleasant and profitable experience.

Key West could do right by Key Plaza. Instead of retrofitting a strip mall to hide massive parking lots behind some trees, let’s go for placemaking. Make it a park, a place to go on Friday nights to hang with friends. I’m not asking for some cutting-edge experiment that costs more than it’s worth. I just want as good as what Publix (and dozens of other brick-and-mortar retailers) are doing on the mainland.

A Key West land-use specialist, Chris Hamilton wrote this in his June 27 column, “Streets for People,” on CarFreeCities.com:

“Nothing’s poured. Nothing’s approved. From here Key Plaza goes to the Planning Board, then the City Commission — the developer’s own attorney told me the whole process could run another year and a half. That’s not a closed door. It’s a wide-open window.

“But a window only matters if somebody climbs through it. These projects sail through with no housing and no imagination not because anyone’s twirling a mustache, but because the room is quiet — the applicant brings what’s easiest, the process checks its boxes and, unless someone stands up and says we want more than this, more than this never gets asked for. Searstown sailed through quietly. This one doesn’t have to.”

Learn more

City explains housing constraints at Key Plaza

Explore the complete preliminary redevelopment proposal