Drive down Broadway this week and the first thing you notice isn't the construction. It's how much of it there is at once. Chain-link now wraps the lot where the Civic Center's exhibit hall used to sit, empty since crews started tearing it down this spring. A few blocks over, cones have narrowed the road near Monument Avenue for a streets project that's been in the works since last year. Banners for two separate hotel developments hang a short walk apart. And in the middle of all of it, Big John's Rockin' BBQ still has smoke coming off the pit, and folding tables are still going up for the farmers market like nothing changed.
Nothing did, exactly. That's the part worth understanding if you spend your weekdays or weekends in this part of town. Downtown Kissimmee isn't going through one renovation. It's running three separate projects on three separate clocks, and the disruption you feel this fall depends entirely on which one you're standing closest to.
Three Projects, One Stretch of Broadway, Three Different Timelines
The biggest of the three is the hardest to miss because it started with a demolition. The city approved Azure Hotel International's plan to replace the Kissimmee Civic Center with a $180 million, 300-room hotel and a 45,000-square-foot convention center back in March. Teardown of the existing building was supposed to start within a month or two of that announcement, and the developer told reporters at the time it would take somewhere between 90 and 220 days once it got going. That's a wide enough window that, depending on where crews actually landed inside it, the lot could either be sitting quiet right now or still an active job site heading into winter. Either way, the hotel itself doesn't start rising until permits clear, something Azure expected to happen by September, with vertical construction on the tower penciled in for January.
A few blocks away, on the site of the old Pleasant Street parking garage, a different developer is running a different project on a different schedule. Skyview Companies' Toho Square is planned as a 120-room boutique hotel with condos, retail and a public trail connection to the lakefront. The completion date attached to that plan, late 2026, is now more than a year old and hasn't been publicly updated since, which is worth knowing if you've been treating it as a fixed date rather than an early estimate.
The third project is the one that actually touches the street you drive on. The Connect Kissimmee Complete Streets Improvement Project is a $16.3 million overhaul of Broadway itself, adding a roundabout, narrowing travel lanes and widening sidewalks, and it was slated to start this past summer. Unlike the two hotel sites, this one isn't contained to a single lot. It's the corridor everyone downtown already uses to get anywhere.
| Project | What it replaces | Scale | Timeline |
|---|---|---|---|
| Azure Hotel & Convention Center | Kissimmee Civic Center | 300 rooms, 45,000 sq ft convention space, $180M | Demolition spring–winter 2026; hotel construction starts January |
| Toho Square | Pleasant Street parking garage | 120-room boutique hotel, condos, retail, lakefront trail | Originally targeted for late 2026 |
| Connect Kissimmee Complete Streets | Broadway's existing lane configuration | New roundabout, lane reduction, wider sidewalks, $16.3M | Began summer 2026 |
Three developers, three timelines, one six-block stretch. If you've felt like downtown has been "under construction" for longer than any single article seemed to explain, this is why. You're not watching one project run long. You're watching three run at once.
Why the City Picked This Exact Moment
None of this is happening by accident. Kissimmee's Economic Development Director, David Rodriguez, has been fairly direct about the logic behind the hotel push: downtown already pulls in heavy tourist and event traffic, and right now almost none of it stays overnight in the neighborhood itself.
"Having a hotel in the downtown of Kissimmee will allow the city to capture a share of all that."
That's the calculation driving both hotel projects at once, not just the larger Azure development. The city isn't betting on one anchor project to change downtown's trajectory. It's betting that stacking multiple projects into the same few years creates enough density, foot traffic and overnight stays to change the math for every existing business on the block, including the one still slinging brisket at Big John's.
The Bank That Became a Restaurant
While two hotels work through permitting, the city's own small-business incentive program has been quietly funding a different kind of change. Since 2022, that program has helped a handful of entrepreneurs convert older downtown buildings into new businesses. Nosso Quintal, a Brazilian restaurant and cultural venue, is its fourth grant recipient, following Z Family Assets, 100 Honeymoons and Hidden Gem. Owner Martins is converting a former bank building into what he's described as a Brazilian backyard, complete with live music and scheduled cultural events, and he was targeting an August opening, which puts it right around now.
The timing isn't incidental. Central Florida has a substantial Brazilian population, and Kissimmee draws heavy tourist volume from Brazil specifically, something the city's economic development office has pointed to directly when explaining why it backed the concept. Rodriguez has also been candid that not every downtown business survives the churn. Some have opened and closed within the same year. The ones staying, in his telling, are the ones betting on the density the hotel projects are supposed to bring.
What Still Runs on Schedule
None of the three big projects touch the lakefront itself, and that's where most of downtown's actual weekly rhythm still lives.
- The Kissimmee Valley Farmers Market still runs the first Friday of every month, 4 to 9 p.m., through Kissimmee Main Street, with vendors set up near Lakefront Park.
- Big John's Rockin' BBQ hasn't slowed down. Owner John Glover has said the restaurant already pulls repeat customers from across the state, and he expects the new hotel traffic to add to that rather than compete with it.
- Kissimmee Lakefront Park, at 201 Lakeview Drive, has a free fantasy, sci-fi and comic book convention scheduled for September 12, with the usual mix of cosplay, artwork and vendor booths that draws people who have nothing to do with any of the construction three blocks away.
- More than 30 locally owned restaurants operate in the downtown district today, per the city's own tourism office, and none of them sit inside the footprint of the Civic Center, Toho Square or the Broadway streets project.
If your routine downtown involves the lakefront pier, the splash pad, the farmers market or a plate of ribs, you're mostly watching this from the outside, not living inside it.
The Practical Read for Anyone Downtown This Fall
Here's the version of this that actually matters if you're planning a normal week around here. The streets project is the one you'll feel first, because it's the only one of the three that changes Broadway itself rather than a single lot off to the side. Expect narrower lanes and shifting sidewalks near Monument Avenue through the fall. The Civic Center site is a fenced hole for now, and depending on which end of the developer's own 90-to-220-day window the crews land on, it could stay that way into December before anything visible starts going up. Toho Square is the one with the least certainty attached to it. The "late 2026" target came from a source that's now more than a year old, and nothing public has confirmed it's still on track.
What hasn't moved is the lakefront itself, the market, the barbecue, and the restaurant scene that keeps adding names even while the skyline three blocks over gets torn apart and rebuilt. That's the actual story here. Not that downtown Kissimmee is changing, but that it's changing in pieces, on different clocks, while the parts people actually use on a Tuesday night keep running exactly like they did last year.
Sanchez Homes tracks these shifts closely because they shape more than a Friday night out. They shape what a future buyer asks about parking, what a hotel three blocks away does to foot traffic for a small business, and what all of it eventually means for property values on streets that touch Broadway. If you're curious how downtown Kissimmee's changes are showing up in your own numbers, reach out to Sanchez Homes or Get Your Free Home Valuation to see where things stand.
