Sunrise brings development inland
By Jeff Zbar | South Florida Business Journal | December 3, 2019
Editor's Note: Our "Corridors of Opportunity" series highlights growing South Florida cities and neighborhoods with a wealth of business opportunities. Sunrise is the second in the series.
After 35 years in east Broward County, car dealer Rick Case went looking for a new location for his corporate headquarters. His business grew as the county grew. However, over time, he noticed activity was moving westward.
So, too, were his staff – and his customers. Even the carmakers were looking to tap the county’s westward development.
A drive north from his dealerships along Interstate 75’s “auto row” to Sunrise Boulevard showed Case his future. There was the Sawgrass Mills mall, which, along with the BB&T Center, welcomed what some claim are 40 million visitors a year. American Express had relocated its local operations – home to 3,000 workers – down the street. A new 100,000-square-foot Amazon.com distribution facility is in the nearby Sawgrass International Corporate Park.
Case couldn’t ignore all those commuters, shoppers and consumers. He saw a vacant parcel near the intersection of Sunrise Boulevard and the Sawgrass Expressway, and his mind was made up.
“It was an easy decision,” said Case, chairman and CEO of Rick Case Automotive Group, which now is based in a five-story headquarters and Kia showroom seconds from the highway. “The growth in the western Sunrise Boulevard corridor has been huge, and they have big plans for the future.”
The auto dealer’s decision is one case study in the growth of a city and a region. This report, the second installment in the Business Journal’s Corridors of Opportunity series, examines the history, growth and future of the city of Sunrise.
Founded in 1961 by an Iowa developer who dropped $9 million for some 2,650 acres of land with plans for a community called Sunrise Golf Village, the city today spans more than 18 square miles and is home to about 90,000 residents.
Then, there are those commuters and visitors. An estimated 40,000 workers commute daily to jobs with American Express, AT&T, health care companies Cigna and Mednax, Norwegian Cruise Line, and the Latin American operations for HBO and Wendy’s International.
The BB&T Center, Sawgrass Mills and Swedish furniture retailer IKEA have made the city a popular destination for people across the tri-county region – and even from Southwest Florida and throughout the Americas. Walk the mall to see tourists with brand-new luggage loaded with the spoils of a day’s shopping.
“The No. 1 single item we sell, other than soda, is luggage,” said David Gott, the mall’s general manager.
Possibly one of the county’s most oddly drawn cities, a stretch of Sunrise reaches north to Commercial Boulevard and south to Interstate 595. It approaches Florida’s Turnpike to the east and stretches west to the Sawgrass Expressway. As if a sign of its ambitious growth, a southern leg envelopes much of the I-595/I-75 interchange and abuts neighboring Weston.
All that asphalt speaks volumes to the city’s accessibility. Sunrise is 15 minutes from Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport and Port Everglades, about 30 minutes from Miami International Airport, and slightly farther from PortMiami. These drive times bode well for companies and executives serving the region’s domestic and international business sectors.
Its location also puts the city within driving distance for South Florida’s 6.16 million residents, who comprise the nation’s seventh-largest metropolitan statistical area.
Such attributes are music to economic development and site selection executives’ ears. The city has long been a model partner and enviable destination in the county’s own economic development efforts. From elected officials to city staff, they all know what smart growth and the attraction of high-wage jobs mean to the region, said Bob Swindell, president and CEO of the Greater Fort Lauderdale Alliance, the county’s official public/private partnership for economic development.
“The city is very business-friendly,” Swindell said. Its efforts help “ensure companies interested in relocating or expanding in Sunrise have the necessary permitting assistance to get up and running quickly.”
Like other older cities across the region, Sunrise is looking for infill and redevelopment opportunities. With hundreds of millions of dollars already spent on capital improvement projects that spurred western development, the city is now assembling properties to the east with an eye on rejuvenating areas built more than 50 years ago.
Thoroughfares like Sunset Strip, Pine Island Road and Northwest 44th Street are seeing commercial and residential redevelopment. Hundreds of single-family homes, townhomes and apartments will rise on unused parcels and the old golf courses that drew early residents. Many new homes will be priced at midmarket to serve the working community, Sandora said.
Timing is key, City Manager Richard Salamon admitted. In two decades, the west will be built out.
“It will be all about redevelopment,” he said. “We need reinvestment by the business community and developers. We need to do things that are more visible.”
With the traffic certain to arrive from billions of dollars in planned development, civic leaders and developers hope to avoid gridlock.
City, county and state planners are studying a host of new surface road and highway improvements. Those include expansion of the intersection at Southwest 136th Street and I-595, and the possible addition of an interchange at Pat Salerno Drive and the Sawgrass Expressway, envisioned as a relief valve for growing traffic at the Sunrise Boulevard interchange to the south.
Tapping an infrastructure funding nest egg from a 1-cent transportation tax approved by voters in November 2018, county and city planners are discussing a rail line from Fort Lauderdale west to the city. In the nearer term, a system of adaptive lights is being rolled out to improve east-west traffic flow, Siegel said.
Area employers and developments have plans for ride-share stops and circulating trolleys that connect with mass transit.
Doria Camaraza spearheaded the site selection, planning and development of American Express’ Sunrise offices.
JOCK FISTICK / SOUTH FLORIDA BUSINESS JOURNAL
Some business executives moved to Sunrise with the faith that traffic would not be an issue. With some 3,000 employees working at American Express’s new regional headquarters, transportation infrastructure and commuting distance, along with award-winning K-12 schools and major universities a drive away, were among the critical criteria, said Doria Camaraza, the AmEx senior VP and general manager who spearheaded the site selection, planning and development of the Sunrise offices.
“Sunrise truly is a commuter’s paradise,” she said. “We have active and productive conversations around how to support the inevitable growth of Sunrise, such as ways to improve the transportation infrastructure.”
With almost 100,000 people, Sunrise is no longer the small golfing community that sprung up nearly six decades ago. Many of its workforce lives there. But company heads and their employees commute from upscale communities in Weston, Plantation, even Coral Springs and Boca Raton.
Like so much of South Florida, those oddly drawn lines that separate cities or the distance between counties are no impediment to traffic – or growth, said Louis Sandora, the city's economic development director.
“They don’t care about those arbitrary lines. That’s for us development people,” he said. “I sell those great amenities in Miami to the south and all the housing options. That’s how professional site developers look at the area. They look at the assets within reach. We happen to be blessed in the center of it all.”