MIAMI-Publix Supermarket has agreed to be the lead tenant, with 28,800 square feet, at the Market Square shopping center in the West Kendall section of Miami-Dade County. The 70,620-square-foot shopping center, which is scheduled to open in August 2011, will also have a 14,820-square-foot Walgreens store, which is almost complete. No other tenants have signed up yet, says Seth Gadinsky, the owner of Gadinsky Real Estate, the leasing agent for the center, “although we’ve had interest from multiple retailers,” he says.

The corner where Market Square is being built, is a very busy one, says Gadinsky. It is a block and a half from Miami-Dade College, where roughly 32,000 students study. Still, the shopping center site was not originally zoned for retail. But the developer of the center, PLC Investments, Inc., a real estate affiliate of the Cejas family in Miami, convinced the neighbors that a shopping center would not disrupt their neighborhood by promising to put a ring of townhomes around the center as a buffer for single family homes. This makes the shopping center smaller.

As for the center being big enough to serve local needs, it turns out, says Gadinsky, “that the marketplace doesn’t want a bigger shopping center. There is too much local space plaguing a lot of other shopping centers already,” he says.

The developer owns another building on Lincoln Road in South Beach, which has retail on the ground floor, says Gadinsky. But they hadn’t built a shopping center from the ground up before, he says. Paul Cejas, for which the development company is named, was the ambassador to Belgium during the Clinton administration. His son Pablo, who is director of PLC Investments, put the team together to develop the shopping center, says Gadinsky.