Along Collins This Summer: What Actually Changed on the Sunny Isles Strip

If you drive Collins Avenue between 163rd and 192nd every day, the barrier island looks the same at 60 miles per hour and completely different at walking pace. The motel-era anchor at 16701 Collins has a new name and a new operator. A six-story building on Biscayne Bay opened its doors this winter as the first purpose-built synagogue in city history. The fishing pier you have walked a hundred times is running on a schedule the city rewrote in March. And the two acres of low-rise oceanfront at 19051 Collins that you have probably stopped noticing are, as of February, cleared for the tallest tower Sunny Isles Beach has ever approved.

None of these are tourist headlines. They are the resident-scale changes that quietly rearrange where you walk the dog, where the traffic backs up on a Friday afternoon, and which construction crane you will be looking at from your balcony for the rest of the decade. Here is what to know, in the order you are most likely to encounter it.

The Newport site reopened under a new name

The property most residents still call "the Newport" is no longer the Newport. The former Newport Beachside Hotel & Resort has been reworked by HB Capital Group into a new resort called The Sunny, which opened in February 2026 with 339 rooms, six food and beverage outlets, and a spa. That matters at ground level for two reasons. First, the food and beverage count. Six new outlets on a single oceanfront parcel is a meaningful shift in walk-in dining supply along the middle of the strip, and it lands in a stretch that has been dominated for years by hotel-lobby restaurants and beach bars catering almost exclusively to guests. Second, the pier sits behind this property, and how the resort operates its ground plane will shape the everyday experience of anyone using the pier or the beach access at Sunny Isles Beach Boulevard.

If you have been avoiding the corner because the construction fencing made it feel closed, it is worth another look. The public beach access at that intersection has always been civic infrastructure, not hotel infrastructure, and it did not go anywhere.

The pier is running on new hours

Speaking of the pier, the city quietly changed the schedule. Starting Monday, March 31, the Newport Fishing Pier moved to an enhanced cleaning schedule with a split weekday operation:

• Monday, Wednesday, and Friday: 12 p.m. to 9 p.m.
• Tuesday and Thursday: 7 a.m. to 9 p.m.
• Saturday and Sunday: 7 a.m. to 9 p.m.

Which is to say, three days a week the pier no longer opens for the sunrise crowd. If your routine has been an early Monday walk out to the end and back before work, that routine now starts on the sand rather than the deck. The 776-foot pier itself is unchanged, and the fee to fish is unchanged, but the rhythm is different enough that it is worth checking the day of the week before you drive over. Details are on the city's Parks and Recreation site.

A new bayfront anchor on the Intracoastal side

Cross Collins and the second story of the year is on the water most visitors never see. In February, the Chabad Russian Center opened the Leizer Verbukh Jewish Community Center, a 39,000-square-foot, six-story building rising above Biscayne Bay. It is the first newly constructed synagogue in Sunny Isles Beach, and the first purpose-built mikvah in the city. The $21 million project also houses the Gan Frida Preschool and Tamim Miami Academy, which together educate more than 180 children.

The community it serves has existed here for two decades, but until this winter it did not have a permanent home. Attorney Mikhael Keifitz, one of the early supporters, described the group's earlier years meeting in condo community rooms and rented strip-mall storefronts before the current building opened. The ribbon cutting drew several hundred attendees, including Mayor Larisa Svechin.

For residents, the practical implication is a new civic address on the bay: a weekday-and-weekend generator of foot traffic, school drop-off patterns, and event parking on the Intracoastal side of Collins. If you live in a bayfront tower nearby, expect a different traffic mix than you are used to. If you have kids in the age band the school serves, the map of options in the city just changed.

What is rising behind all of this

The tower pipeline is the slower story, but it is the one that will define what the skyline looks like when the current elementary schoolers finish high school. Three names worth keeping straight:

19051 Collins Avenue. In February, the Sunny Isles Beach City Commission approved a 62-story, roughly 820-foot oceanfront tower on the two-acre site currently occupied by the Miami Beach Club, a 108-unit residential building completed in 1951. The project is a joint venture of The Related Group, Dezer Development, and BH Group; the development group acquired the parcel in 2025 for approximately $131.8 million. Architecture is by Cohen Freedman Encinosa, with landscape architecture by Enzo Enea. The approved plan calls for 145 residences ranging from three to six bedrooms, with full-floor penthouses at the top. At its proposed height, it would exceed the 672-foot Estates at Acqualina and the 750-foot St. Regis Residences currently under construction, making it the tallest building in the city. Hard construction costs are listed at roughly $293.6 million, with total development costs near $351.2 million. Completion is targeted for December 2031. Site plan details are in the YIMBY project brief.

St. Regis Residences Sunny Isles. The twin-tower project on roughly 4.7 acres of oceanfront, designed by Arquitectonica with interiors by Patricia Anastassiadis, is targeting completion of its first, taller tower around 2026, with the second tower to follow. Just under 200 apartments in the first phase.

Bentley Residences Sunny Isles. Anticipated to deliver in the second half of the decade. Delivery dates on preconstruction projects of this scale often move, so if you are tracking these because a friend is a buyer, treat the year as a horizon rather than a date.

Read together, the pipeline is not diversifying the type of building along the strip. It is deepening it. Every new tower is a full-service, amenity-heavy residential product with hotel-adjacent service expectations. The 1951 low-rise at 19051 Collins is not being replaced by a mid-rise, and there is no version of this pipeline where the beach block gets shorter.

Reading the pattern

The temptation with any roundup like this is to file the four items in four different mental folders: hospitality, community, parks, development. They belong in one folder. Sunny Isles Beach is in the middle of trading its motel-era ground plane for something denser, more branded, and more organized around full-time residents rather than seasonal visitors. The Sunny replaces the Newport. A permanent civic building replaces two decades of borrowed rooms. The pier gets a more disciplined operating schedule. The last two-acre low-rise on that stretch of oceanfront gets entitled for a 62-story tower. The through line is that the amenities and institutions residents actually use every day are being built to last, and the buildings around them are being scaled up to match.

For owners, that is mostly a good story and partly a patience story. The good part is that resident-serving infrastructure, a real synagogue and school, a maintained pier, a hotel with public-facing food and beverage, adds daily texture that most oceanfront neighborhoods in South Florida do not have. The patience part is that some of it arrives on a 2031 timeline, and the crane count on Collins is not going down between now and then.

If you have been thinking about how any of these changes affect your specific building, your view corridor, or the timing of a move within the city, that conversation is worth having with someone who tracks this block by block. Reach out to Pasquale Pisana any time. Let's Connect.