15. The City That Was Never Supposed to Have a Downtown

Most South Florida cities grew up around something. A train depot, a Main Street, a waterfront. Coconut Creek never did. It was master-planned in the 1960s to be nothing but neighborhoods, and for sixty years it had no downtown at all.

That's about to change on a scale that's hard to overstate. On 170 acres in the dead center of the city, on land that was a working farm for over a century, developers are building a brand-new downtown from scratch: a Whole Foods, more than 1,600 homes, 50 acres of parks, and a billion-dollar price tag.

In this episode I trace the whole arc. The Johns family, who started farming beans on this land in 1918 and held it for more than 90 years. The $68 million land deal, and why national homebuilder Lennar buying in is the moment it got real. What they're actually building, and the one big thing they deliberately left out. The catch hiding inside "from scratch." Why the numbers keep changing. And what a manufactured downtown does to property values, block by block, if you own a home anywhere near it.

Plus the question nobody's answered yet: can a city known as the Butterfly Capital of the World pave a farm and keep its soul?

Chapters:

• A city with no downtown
• The Johns Family Farm, 1918 to today
• The deal that made it real
• What they're actually building
• The asterisk on "from scratch"
• Why the numbers keep changing
• What it means for your home
• The butterfly and the farm

The Friendly Scoop covers Broward and Palm Beach County. For the full written breakdown, visit https://thefriendlyscoop.com/news/mainstreet-coconut-creek-downtown-2026. Brought to you by Chris Cusimano (Cusi), HomesbyCusi.com

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

I want to show you something on a map. This is Coconut Creek. It has about 60,000 people and it's located in northwest Broward County. There's butterflies on the water tower, there's good schools, and there's quiet streets. And now I want you to try something. Try to find and point out its downtown. Now go ahead, find the main street, find the town square, find the place where you'll say, Well, hey guys, meet me downtown. Meet me here. The thing is, you really can't. And that's not an accident. This city was designed on purpose back in the 1960s to not have one. 60 years of neighborhoods and strip centers and not a real beating heart. Now that's until right about now, because on this piece of land right here, in the dead center of the city, on 170 acres that was a working farm for over a century, they are building an entire downtown from scratch. It's a billion-dollar downtown area with a Whole Foods, 1600 homes, and 50 acres of parks. And the bulldozers, well, they're already there and the farmland is being cleared as we speak. The story of how a bean farm from 1918 becomes a billion-dollar city center in 2026 is stranger and a lot more human than the renderings let on. And to fully understand the context of this, we have to go back. We have to first understand why the city doesn't already have a downtown because most do. We need to think about how a normal town gets built. It grows up around something. It could be a train depot, a waterfront, a courthouse square. People cluster around the thing, and then a downtown just naturally happens around that thing. The thing is, Coconut Creek never had that thing. It was master planned in the 1960s as a residential suburb and incorporated in 1967. It was designed to be for neighborhoods, full stop. And the thing is it actually worked for what it was supposed to be, but it left the city with a very specific hole right in the middle. A Publix Plaza here, a Walgreens on that corner, a chain restaurant off the highway, all of it connected by cars. There's no like they're there. You can't just walk to dinner. There's no square to meet at, there's no center of gravity. And for about 60 years, nobody really treated it as a problem. And that was the deal. That was because it was designed for suburbs. But then something shifted, and the city looked at the empty middle and made a decision most cities never get the chance to make. They decided to build the heart that they were never given in the first place. But to understand what's going on, you have to understand what was there first. And this is the part that stopped me. The land has a name. Everyone around it calls it the Johns Family Farm. The story started in 1918 when a couple named Joe and even Johns, who came down from North Florida to farm beans, and this family didn't just pass through, they became part of Broward County's history. Joe Johns was even credited in his obituary with some of the earliest development in Oakland Park. He had a cattle ranch, citrus growth farms. He was a genuine pioneer. Their son, Earl Johns, held onto this farm for decades. When developers came knocking over and over and over over the years, Earl said no, he just kept on farming. He held onto this land until he died in 2009 at 90 years old. And this is the deal that gets me. As recently as 2018, part of that ground was still being leased to a farmer. They were growing tomatoes. Yes, tomatoes on the exact dirt where they're about to pour a foundation for a Whole Foods. So let's sit with that whole arc just for a second. A bean farm that started in 1918, held by one family for more than 9 years, and then tomatoes grown there less than a decade ago, and is now going to be a billion-dollar downtown area. That is basically the entire story of South Florida compressed into one parcel of land. And to their credit, the developers say they're not erasing it. There's going to be a dedicated space inside the project honoring the farming past and 14 acres set aside as a preserved wetland. So let's hold on to that for a moment because that actually matters at the very end of this video. Now we have to be real, this downtown has probably been coming for a very long time. And I mean comically a long time. The city adopted its official Main Street design standards, the whole vision for a walkable downtown way back in December of 2004. That's 20 years ago. It was planned and then put on the shelf. It's a pretty idea that nobody could quite pull off. So we need to ask ourselves what changed? Well, two things changed and they happened back to back, and they're the reason we're even having this conversation. One, in late 2025, a group of developers operating together as GSR real estate partners actually bought the land, roughly 170 acres for 68 million dollars. They didn't option it and they didn't talk about it, they just closed on it. And the second one, which is the move that tells you that this is real, almost immediately they turned around and sold a big chunk of that land to Lenar, one of the biggest home builders in the entire country, for about $40 million. Lenar is the national builder looking at this project and betting tens of millions of dollars that it gets built. Lenar takes the homes, the townhomes, and the villas and the condos. The original group keeps the apartments and the retail. So having a closed purchase and a national builder writing a huge check is a completely different animal than a simple design standard just sitting on a shelf. That's the moment Main Street stopped being a concept and became a construction site. All right, so we need to talk about it. What does a billion dollars actually buy? Well, I got the shopping list for you. First off, well, obviously it's housing. Around 1,650 homes and deliberately not all the same kind. Roughly 790 apartments, over 400 townhomes, nearly 300 condos, and about 150 villas. There's going to be rentals and for sale mixed together. So you get young renters and downsizing retirees and families all within the same few blocks. Next on the menu, you have retail. You have a grocery anchored shopping center, and that anchor they're planning on using is Whole Foods, which, if you know suburban real estate, is a signal all by itself because Whole Food does not go where it doesn't believe the rooftops can sustain its business. And here's the choice I found a little fascinating. There's no office space in the plan. And that was on purpose. They looked at how the office space world would change their dynamic and they decided to leave it out. So we can read it to that for what we want, but that's where things are about to go. And this is the part that makes it a place instead of just a parking lot. It's gonna have over 50 acres of parks and plazas, a central village green with a splash pad, a dog park, a performance area, public art, that 14-acre wetland preserve that we spoke about earlier, and over six miles of biking and walking trails. And what's really ironic about all of this is that the entire thing is built to be the exact opposite feel and concept of what Coconut Creek was built for back in the 1960s. This entire thing is built for people on foot, which, in a city built for cars, is a completely radical idea. Now I told you from the start that the city has no downtown and that it's being built completely from scratch. And that's mostly true. But I left something out, and this actually makes the story even better. Because Coconut Creek already had two big angers sitting right inside the exact downtown zone. There's the Promenade, which is a 23-acre open-air shopping and dining center that opened way back in 2008. This has around 55 stores and restaurants, a movie theater, Cooper's Hawk, Sephora, and for almost 20 years, it has been the closest thing the city has had to a town center. And adjacent to that, there's a Seminole Casino. It's a 24-7 entertainment and dining destination that pulls people in from all over the region. So here's the honest version of this story. Coconut Creek already had the shopping. It had dining, it had entertainment, it had plenty of homes. What it never had was a beating heart. It didn't have a place where the homes, the Central Green, the parks, the grocery store were like connective tissue that turns a cluster of destinations into a place where people actually wanted to live. And that, that right there is what Main Street is building. A residential downtown genuinely being built from scratch. It's just rising around anchors that had been open for business for years. And oddly enough, that's a stronger hand to play. A brand new downtown has to prove people will even show up. And this one is filling the middle of a district that's already been drawing crowds for about two decades. Now, if you've been following the local news on this particular project, you've probably noticed that the numbers never sit still. And there's a reason for it. And it tells you how these projects really work. Main Street started life way bigger. 20 years ago, it was a 500-acre concept, bigger than the Solgrass Mills Mall, with up to 10,000 homes. However, what's actually getting built now is about half of that. As one city commissioner put it, the concept simply evolved. And here's the part worth understanding because it actually cuts into the residents' favor. The zoning the city approved allows for way more than what's being built. Up to 3,750 units on paper. The developer's actual plan is far smaller than that. That gap is pretty normal when it comes to builders because that approved number is just a ceiling. It's not a promise. So when you see a scary big figure floating around the internet, that's usually the maximum allowed, not the thing that's actually going to be built. And one more piece, let's talk about the money. All the roads and the pipes and the drainage is going to cost about $82 million. And some of that gets financed through special districts tied to the project. But in mid-2026, the city locked in an agreement that puts the required road work to the developer, not the public. In plain English, this means that the developer is going to pay for the roads its own project needs. So the question we need to ask ourselves: why does this one development on an old farm in one Broward County suburb matter to you? This is because a walkable downtown is an amenity this kind of suburb has never had. When a city manufactures one with a grocery anchor and restaurants and parks and a green to gather on, the homes with easy access to it tend to benefit over time. Walkability has become one of the most durable value drivers in real estate, and Coconut Creek is about to generate a giant dose of where there was absolutely zero of that. But proximity cuts both ways, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise. The homes right up against the construction or the busiest new roads live through years of building first and more traffic later. A few blocks makes a real difference. Where you sit relative to this thing is the whole game. And if you zoom out, a billion dollar downtown doesn't just change its own blocks, it changes how people think about the whole city. It becomes a reason to move here. And that where do you want to actually live? Conversation is upstream of everything within real estate. Now I want to leave you with a detail that makes this whole thing land a little bit harder for me. Coconut Creek's official nickname is the butterfly capital of the world. It's home to Butterfly World, the largest butterfly aviary on the planet. The monarch is literally the city's mascot. This is a place that built its entire identity around butterflies. And now the city's paving a farm to build a downtown. There's a real tension in that, and some locals have said it out loud. You can't brand yourself around butterflies and bulldoze farmland without somebody noticing. But the answer is baked into the plan. The 14 acres of wetland they're preserving, the six miles of trails, the talk of milkweed and pollinator landscaping. And here milkweed matters because it's the one plant a monarch caterpillar actually needs to survive. So that's the real question hanging over all of this. Not whether they can build a billion-dollar downtown. They can, and they probably are. It's whether a downtown that you build from scratch can hold on to the soul of the place that it replaced, whether the butterflies actually come back. And we can't forget about the land that Joe and Eva John started farming back in 1918 and that their family held on to for more than 90 years, that is being cleared right now as I record this. The first stores are expected to open up in 27, and the rest is gonna fill in block by block over the next few years after that. Now we get to watch this happen in real time on that map. And I'll be following every stage of this right here. So if you want to actually understand what's rising in your backyard and what this means for your property values, well, stick around because I'll give you some updates as they come. And by the way, if you're thinking about buying or selling anywhere in Southeast Florida or reach out to the Homespy Coozi team, because we'll love to help you.