If you have been bracing for orange barrels on Broadway this summer, you can relax for a little while longer. The road work that has been the subject of two public meetings, a city commission vote, and more than a year of downtown chatter is not the first thing arriving in Historic Downtown Kissimmee. It is actually the last.
That matters if you live within walking distance of Lakefront Park, because the sequence tells you something the rumor mill has not: the changes hitting your daily routine first are not the ones everyone has been talking about. They are the ones nobody expected downtown to get at all.
The Road Diet Everyone Heard About Got Pushed Back A Year
The Connect Kissimmee Complete Streets project is real, and it will eventually reshape the stretch of Broadway that runs through the heart of downtown. The current plan calls for a road diet on roughly 0.4 miles of Broadway between Neptune Road and Ruby Avenue, cutting the corridor from four lanes to two, adding a roundabout at Ruby Avenue and Stewart Avenue, and widening the sidewalks that architect and longtime downtown business owner Ray Parsons has said were never built with pedestrians in mind. Parsons' family has developed more than fifty buildings downtown over the decades, including 1881 Restaurant and Bar, and his read on Broadway is blunt: "it just hasn't been very pedestrian-friendly."
Here is what most residents have not caught up to yet. When the project was first approved in April 2025, the city pegged construction to begin in summer 2026, which is right now. But the most recent reporting, out of a public meeting held in mid-July 2026, pushed that start date back to 2027. The project's price tag moved too, from an originally approved $16.3 million to a current estimate of $29.9 million, according to city officials at that same meeting.
The reasoning behind the road diet is not just about walkability. Broadway currently carries about 22,000 vehicles a day, and Florida Department of Transportation modeling for 2030 found that trimming it to two lanes could redistribute 46 percent of that traffic onto other routes, primarily John Young Parkway. Not everyone downtown is convinced that redistribution works out cleanly. Tiffany Pineiro, who works downtown and lives nearby, put it plainly: "I would say the traffic would be extremely backed up."
"There's a lot of traffic, a lot of noise, not a lot of good lighting." — Ray Parsons, on why Broadway needs the redesign
So if your mental calendar has said "construction starts this summer" for the past year, update it. The barrels are not coming in 2026. They are coming in 2027, and Phase 2, covering Emmett Street and Main Street, follows after that with no lane reductions currently planned.
What's Actually Landing This Year: The Neighborhood's First Hotel
While the road project waits, something with almost no public debate has been quietly moving forward two blocks away, and it is arguably the bigger story for anyone who has lived downtown for more than a few years. Downtown Kissimmee has never had a hotel. Not one, in its entire history as a historic district with lakefront festivals and its own Brightline station.
That changes with Skyview Companies' project at 92 Pleasant Street, next to the Toho Square parking garage. The $31 million development will bring a 128-room Sonesta hotel along with residential condominiums, and Kissimmee's own tourism office has called it the first hotel ever built in Downtown Kissimmee. A 2024 HVS market study helps explain why this took so long. Despite the Brightline connection, the lakefront festivals, and a growing events calendar, downtown Kissimmee captures only 5 percent of overnight visitors to Osceola County. There was simply nowhere to put them.
Next door, a separate Skyview project on the old Barron Collier site at 400 W. Emmett Street was planned to bring something residents have been asking for even longer than a hotel: a grocery store. The mixed-use tower was designed to also include a microbrewery and a food court, and it sits two blocks from the Kissimmee SunRail station. If you have driven to Publix on 192 because there was nothing closer, this is the project meant to change that math.
The Old Civic Center's Turn Is Next
The third piece of downtown's near-term future sits at 201 E. Dakin Street, where the current 38,000-square-foot Kissimmee Civic Center is set to become a $150 million-plus hotel and convention center, developed by Azure Hotel International. The new $35 million, city-owned convention center is meant to replace a facility that has aged out of relevance, and the plan calls for the city to retain all convention center revenue plus 5 percent of hotel revenue under the term sheet presented to commissioners.
The timeline here is the one most likely to show up on your street before the road diet does. Azure's plan called for demolishing the existing civic center in early 2026, a milestone that, if the schedule held, is already behind us as of this writing. City officials had said construction fencing could appear around the site as early as mid-2026, so if you drive past Dakin Street and see fencing up, that is this project, not a false alarm. The convention center itself is targeted for completion in the fourth quarter of 2028, with the hotel opening in the second quarter of 2029.
Put the three projects in the order they will actually hit your daily life, and the picture looks like this:
- Right now, through the rest of 2026: the Toho Square hotel-condo project and the Emmett Street grocery and brewery tower keep moving, with no lane closures or major disruption to how you get around.
- This year, quite possibly already underway: fencing goes up around the old Civic Center as demolition and site prep begin for the convention center project.
- 2027: Broadway's road diet construction finally starts, a year later than the original plan.
- Late 2028 into 2029: the new convention center opens, followed by its adjoining hotel a couple of quarters later.
That order matters because it means the disruption people have been dreading, the lane closures and detours, is actually the last domino to fall. The changes you will notice first are additive: a hotel where there has never been one, and a grocery store within walking distance.
The Downtown You Can Still Enjoy Exactly As It Is
None of this changes what downtown Kissimmee already offers today, and it is worth sitting in that for a minute before any of the above lands. Lakefront Park still delivers the same sunset over Lake Toho it always has, free and open, with the colorful umbrella-lined streets nearby still doing exactly what they were built to do for anyone walking through with a coffee.
The food scene downtown has kept building steadily around all of this construction talk. Titi Jessica New Yorican on Broadway has become the kind of spot locals recommend by name rather than category. Susana's Cafe draws a steady brunch crowd for its Venezuelan and Costa Rican-inspired plates. Willy Wiener's Hotdogs is the quick, no-fuss stop that has earned local-legend status the old-fashioned way, by being reliably good for a long time. For an evening drink, 1881 Restaurant and Bar, tied to the same Parsons family pushing for the Broadway redesign, still pours the handcrafted cocktails it is known for. And at Café Barista, the staff has watched downtown's population growth show up in the till for years now, long before any of these bigger projects broke ground.
That is the version of downtown Kissimmee that exists today, independent of hotels, grocery stores, or road diets still years out. It is worth using while you have it in its current, unconstructed form, because within the next two years, walking down Broadway, parking near Pleasant Street, and driving past the old Civic Center are all going to look different than they do this month.
If you are watching these projects because you are curious what they mean for property values on your block, or you are weighing whether now is the time to make a move before any of this construction lands, that is a conversation worth having with someone who tracks Osceola County block by block rather than headline by headline. Orlando A to Z keeps an eye on exactly this kind of shift across Greater Orlando, and a free home valuation is a good place to start if you want to know where your street stands before the fencing goes up.
