Walk the Underline on a Thursday morning near Vizcaya Station Plaza and you'll find a free community fitness class already running, part of a weekly series that continues through February 2027. Come back later in the week for yoga at the same plaza, or in October for a dog walk that turns the corridor into a social route for Brickell's pet owners. None of this waited for a ribbon cutting. The corridor has been hosting Brickell's daily life for years, in pieces, while the county's own paperwork keeps pushing the finish line further out.
That gap between what's already working and what's officially finished is the real story in Brickell this fall, and it cuts in an unexpected direction. The neighborhood's private economy, the restaurants and retail leases that get built with a signed contract and a construction loan, keeps landing on schedule. The public infrastructure project running underneath all of it keeps needing more money and more time.
The Openings That Happened When They Said They Would
Brickell Key spent close to a year without an obvious answer for dinner after La Mar closed as the Mandarin Oriental Miami prepared for redevelopment. The Mexican filled that gap this spring at 601 Brickell Key Drive, arriving with more than 10,000 square feet and seating for over 330 guests across dining rooms, private spaces, and terraces facing Biscayne Bay. Above the financial district, Seia opened this spring too, on the 54th and 55th floors of 830 Brickell, a partnership between OKO Group and the Bastion Collection, the group behind Le Jardinier and South Florida's only two-Michelin-starred restaurant. The 55th floor operates as a members-only club with its own private terrace. The 54th floor is open to anyone with a reservation.
Retail moved on a similarly tight clock. Weeks before the ownership changed hands, Brickell City Centre's original developer, Swire Properties, signed nine new leases totaling more than 29,000 square feet, led by Aritzia, Alo Yoga, Vuori, and Dior Beauty, according to Chain Store Age's reporting on the leasing push. Simon Property Group then closed a $497.7 million cash deal on June 27, 2025, buying out Swire's remaining stake in the center's retail and parking components, according to Simon's own SEC filing, and inherited a leasing pipeline that was already moving. PopUp Bagels, the brand that started as a backyard pandemic project in Westport, Connecticut, before building a cult following on social media, has its Brickell location listed as "coming soon" on 801 Brickell's own building site.
Every one of those projects had a start date, a signed agreement, and a private party with a financial reason to hit it.
The One Project That Keeps Sliding
The Underline runs a different clock. Phase 3, the 7.36-mile final segment connecting the Vizcaya Metrorail station to Dadeland South, got its construction contract in October 2022, awarded to NV2A Central Joint Venture for an estimated $109 million, according to Miami-Dade County's own project page. For years, county materials and coverage described the segment as on track to finish in 2026.
That timeline has been getting more expensive to hold. In December 2025, county commissioners approved close to $8 million in added funding for scope changes, covering upgraded plazas, Wi-Fi across the corridor, streetlighting, and design adjustments to preserve the existing tree canopy. Then in July 2026, commissioners approved another $2.25 million increase, this time for the construction, inspection, and engineering contract with Calvin, Giordano & Associates, which rose to $8.25 million and was extended another 270 days, according to Miami Today's reporting on the vote.
"I understand it needs to pass, but fundamentally understand what we are doing," Commissioner Oliver Gilbert said of the increase.
Gilbert was one of three commissioners who voted against it. A 270-day extension on the engineering and inspection contract, approved in the middle of 2026, is hard to square with a segment that's still being described as finishing this year. The earlier phases offer a preview of how this tends to go: Phase 1, the Brickell Backyard, opened in February 2021. Phase 2 didn't open until April 2024, three years later, connecting SW 13th Street through the historic Roads, Shenandoah, and Silver Bluff neighborhoods to SW 19th Avenue. If Phase 3 follows that same rhythm, the fully finished 10-mile corridor from Brickell to Dadeland is a 2027 story, not a 2026 one, even if individual stretches keep opening and hosting programming well before that.
What's Already Open While You Wait on the Rest
The corridor doesn't need a ribbon cutting to be useful, and the fall calendar makes that clear. Here's what's actually running right now, according to the Underline's own event listings:
- Weekly community fitness class, Thursdays through February 11, 2027, combining strength training with a guided group run beneath the Metrorail corridor
- Weekly yoga, at Vizcaya Station Plaza
- TUMBAO's fifth anniversary edition, October 3, pairing Miami DJs with food, drinks, and Hispanic Heritage Month programming, part of a monthly first-Saturday series running through June 2027
- A guided community dog walk, October 15, turning the corridor into a social route for Brickell's pet owners
- A volunteer green-space workday, also October 3, for residents who want to put in a morning of hands-on maintenance
None of this is a preview of something coming later. It's the corridor functioning now, in the same segments the county is still extending contracts to finish.
Why the Mismatch Is Worth Tracking If You Live Here
The lesson from Brickell's last few years isn't that public projects move slower than private ones, everyone already assumes that. It's how much daily life the neighborhood has learned to build on top of an unfinished asset. Residents were using the Brickell Backyard for community fitness, dog walks, and gathering space for three full years before Phase 2 caught up to it. The same pattern is playing out now with Phase 3: an active events calendar layered onto a construction contract that just got nine more months.
That matters for anyone deciding when to start treating the Underline as a fixture of their routine versus something to wait on. If the pattern from Phase 1 and Phase 2 holds, waiting for an official 2026 completion announcement means missing at least a year, possibly more, of programming that's already running. The smarter read is to track what's open segment by segment, the way the fitness class, the yoga series, and TUMBAO already are, rather than anchoring to a county timeline that has moved twice in the last year alone.
The restaurants and retail leases tell the opposite story. When a private operator signs a lease in Brickell, the neighborhood tends to get what it was promised, on roughly the schedule it was promised. When the county extends a contract, it's worth asking what that means for the next one.
If you're curious what any of this means for property values along the corridor, or you just want to talk through what's actually changing on your block versus what's still on paper, the Azua Nardon Team knows this stretch of Brickell block by block. And if you're ever ready to see what your Brickell home is worth in today's market, get your free home valuation and we'll walk you through it.
