South Gate's Homeowners Got Their Permit. The Mall Across the Street Still Doesn't Have One.

Sometime this spring, the South Gate Community Association posted a one-line update for its members: the Army Corps of Engineers "high spot" permit to dredge Phillippi Creek was in hand. It was the kind of announcement that only matters if you've watched storm debris pile up against a decades-old weir during hurricane season, which is exactly the audience the association was writing for.

A few hundred yards away, on the same stretch of South Tamiami Trail, a much bigger project has been sitting since November 2024 with a City Commission approval and no comparable permit of its own. Benderson Development's plan to redevelop the largely empty Crossings at Siesta Key, the property most South Gate residents still call by its older name, Southgate Mall, cleared its Comprehensive Plan hurdle almost two years ago. Since then, the mall has lost its last anchor tenant. It has not gained a demolition permit, a site plan, or a groundbreaking date.

That gap between an approved plan and an actual permit is the part of this story that doesn't show up in the renderings.

One Corner, Eight Names, Since 1957

The property at 3501 South Tamiami Trail opened as South Gate Shopping Plaza on January 15, 1957, an outdoor strip anchored by a Publix and a Winn-Dixie, with a W.T. Grant and a Woolworth rounding out the block. That's barely a year after the South Gate Community Association itself was incorporated in 1956 to manage the new subdivision going up on the other side of the road, bounded roughly by Bee Ridge Road, Tamiami Trail, Beneva Road, and Hyde Park Street.

The plaza kept changing while the neighborhood didn't. JCPenney arrived in 1961. Burdines took over in 1977. Saks Fifth Avenue moved in behind a 1996 renovation, the same era Williams-Sonoma and Ann Taylor showed up to match. Westfield bought the property in 2002 and renamed it twice over the next two decades. By 2020 it was Crossings at Siesta Key, and in 2022 Benderson Development, the company behind the Mall at University Town Center, closed on it for $25.1 million.

Across the street, the same Victor Lundy-designed community center the association dedicated in September 1956 is still standing, still hosting the pool the association describes as the oldest continuously operating one in the Sarasota area. One side of Tamiami Trail has had eight identities. The other has had one.

What You Can Still Walk Into Tonight

None of this means the property is a fenced-off construction site. As of this year, CineBistro, Connors Steak & Seafood, LA Fitness, Chico's, and Aldi are still open and operating inside the property, some of them in spaces that used to belong to Dillard's. Macy's is the one that's gone. It announced its closure on January 9, 2025 as part of a chain-wide plan to shutter 66 stores nationwide, and the Sarasota location closed for good on March 23, 2025, leaving the property with no department store anchor for the first time since the plaza expanded past its original grocery-and-five-and-dime footprint in the early 1960s.

If you're deciding where to catch a movie or grab dinner near South Gate this month, the answer is still the same corner it's been for years. The empty anchor boxes are the part of the property that's actually changed.

The Vote That Wasn't a Groundbreaking

The Comprehensive Plan amendment the Sarasota City Commission approved on October 21, 2024, with a required second vote on November 4, didn't authorize construction. It reclassified the land so Benderson could eventually build a mix of retail, office space, and up to 848 apartments on the property's eastern side, along what conceptual drawings show as South School Avenue. As part of that approval, Benderson agreed to price a share of those apartments as attainable housing, with thresholds tied to how many units get built: at least 20 of the first 400, 50 of the first 450, and 85 of the first 750, priced for households earning up to 120 percent of the area's median income.

Here's a rough sense of how slowly this has actually moved:

Three years after the first workshop and nearly two years after final approval, the visible sign of change on the property has been a store closing, not a building coming down.

Why the Mall Needs Connors and Aldi to Stay Open a While Longer

Benderson's own director of development told city commissioners during the approval process that the mall building's demolition and the site's stormwater mitigation, which doesn't currently exist, are the expensive parts that have to happen before any new construction starts. Rather than borrow against the whole project up front, the company has described its approach as sequential: use revenue from the property's early phases, including the existing leases, to fund the infrastructure that later phases depend on. Benderson has also said it intends to hold the property long-term rather than build and sell, which is part of why the Sarasota Observer's coverage of the approval describes a projected build-out of 10 to 15 years rather than a fixed opening date.

Practically, that means the leases at CineBistro, Connors Steak & Seafood, LA Fitness, Chico's, and Aldi aren't just placeholders waiting to be evicted. They're part of what's funding the demolition and drainage work that has to happen before the first apartment foundation gets poured. Anyone eating dinner at Connors this year is, in a literal sense, keeping the redevelopment timeline on schedule rather than delaying it.

The Volunteer Association Already Has Its Permit

The contrast gets sharper once you put the two projects side by side. The South Gate Community Association is an all-volunteer nonprofit that charges $200 a year for resident membership, and its current infrastructure project is dredging Phillippi Creek and removing a low-water weir that replaced the original 1931 salinity dam back in 1962. The weir hasn't functioned properly in decades, according to the association, and it became a bigger concern after the 2024 flooding pushed the issue onto the county's radar. That project now has its Army Corps dredging permit in hand, a detail the association posted to its own site this year.

Meanwhile, a national developer with a $25.1 million acquisition and a nearly two-year-old city approval still hasn't filed for the demolition permit that has to precede any work on the mall building itself. It isn't a knock on Benderson's process, which is exactly the kind of sequenced, capital-intensive undertaking large redevelopments require. It's a reminder that "approved" and "permitted" are two different milestones, and the smaller, cheaper project cleared the harder one first.

What Actually Signals Movement

If you're watching this corner from South Gate, the thing to track isn't a rendering or another City Commission vote. Renderings and Comprehensive Plan language have existed since 2023. The next real signal will be a demolition permit or site plan application filed with the City of Sarasota, since that's the procedural step that has to happen before the enclosed mall sections or the old Macy's building can come down. Until that filing shows up, the property will likely keep looking exactly like it does now: a handful of active storefronts wrapped around two empty anchor boxes, funding a decade-long plan one lease payment at a time. The full ownership and tenant history of the property is documented on Wikipedia, if you want to see just how many names this one corner has worn since 1957.

The creek project and the mall project were announced in reverse order of how they're likely to finish. The volunteer association's permit came first. The developer's still hasn't.

If you're keeping an eye on what happens to this corner of South Gate, or just want to talk through how a project like this typically plays out over a decade, Bonnie Schiavone has been tracking Sarasota's redevelopment patterns for a long time and is glad to walk through what's actually filed versus what's still just proposed.