If you live anywhere near SilverLeaf, Durbin Crossing, or Julington Creek, you have probably seen the same LinkedIn post or local news clip more than once this year: a rendering of a shopping center, a grocer's logo, a quote about "one of Northeast Florida's fastest-growing communities." The announcements arrive so often that they start to blur together, and it gets hard to tell which ones mean a building is actually coming and which ones mean a company filed some paperwork.
Here's the pattern once you sort it out: every for-profit retailer chasing Durbin Park has either opened its doors or locked in a construction timeline within a year or two of announcing. The one project that has been "coming soon" the longest, the Peyton Family YMCA, was first announced back in November 2021 with a target opening of late 2023. It still hadn't broken ground as of this spring. That gap tells you something real about how this corner of St. Johns County actually gets built, and it is worth knowing before you plan your errands around a press release.
What's already open
Start with what you can drive to today. The Publix at SilverLeaf opened March 26, and it is not a routine grocery opening. At 55,701 square feet, it is the largest Publix location in Northeast Florida, well above the chain's typical footprint of about 50,000 square feet. It debuted with Publix's newer format built around a Pours bar serving beer, wine, and coffee alongside smoothies and acai bowls, plus an expanded deli with burrito bowls and pizza. A 2,100-square-foot liquor store opened next door within the week.
A few other names are already serving customers nearby:
- Pecan Craft Kitchen opened December 20, 2025, in Julington Creek, just south of the Julington Creek Bridge on Florida 13. It's a farm-to-fire concept built around a pecan-fired grill, with 120 seats and a covered patio, from the operators behind more than 50 Moe's Southwest Grill locations.
- M Shack signed a lease in January for a 3,300-square-foot spot inside the SilverLeaf Publix center, with plans for a full bar and outdoor seating. As of that January announcement, the county had not yet issued a build-out permit, so treat this one as leased but not yet built.
What has an actual construction date
One project in Durbin Park has moved past announcements entirely and into a fixed calendar. UF Health's medical office building, a 72,000-square-foot, three-story facility, is slated to open this summer. The much larger piece, a five-story, roughly 220,000-square-foot hospital with 99 inpatient beds and a 24-hour emergency department, is targeted for this fall. Given today's date, that means the hospital's opening window is now a matter of weeks, not years. The hospital alone is a $285 million project, and it sits on the same health campus where the long-planned YMCA is supposed to go. It is also the rare Durbin Park project that has actually stuck to a multi-year public timeline without slipping.
What's still a land deal and a press release
Then there's the tier of projects that are real in the sense that money has changed hands, but are still a long way from a ribbon cutting.
| Project | What's confirmed | What's still open |
|---|---|---|
| The Berkeley at Durbin Park (Regency Centers) | Land acquired on East Peyton Parkway; Whole Foods, TJ Maxx, Firebirds Wood Fired Grill, and Shake Shack named as tenants | Groundbreaking targeted for Q4 2026, meaning stores likely won't open until well into 2027 or later |
| Sprouts-anchored center | Site plans filed for a roughly 30,000-square-foot grocery matching Sprouts' footprint, across from UF Health Durbin Park | Still under county and water management district review as of May 2026, with no approval date set |
| Chick-fil-A near The Fountains at St. Johns | Site identified at County Road 210 and Moon Bay Parkway, Development Review Committee review underway | Still early in the permitting process, with a dual drive-thru design still under discussion |
| Life Time Fitness | JEA issued a service availability letter for an 85,000-square-foot club | Company says it's "still very early in the process" with no site plan finalized |
The Berkeley deal is worth a second look because it is genuinely further along than the others. Regency Centers, the Jacksonville-based REIT behind it, confirmed the tenant lineup on LinkedIn in July and described the project as designed to serve one of the region's fastest-growing communities. That is a meaningfully stronger signal than a rezoning application. But a Q4 2026 groundbreaking on a shopping center still means construction, leasing, and buildout stretching well past this list's other names before anyone bags groceries there.
The Sprouts proposal sits a step behind that. County records show the site is still working through review as of late May, with no vote yet scheduled to approve it outright.
The project that breaks the pattern
Every name above, whether open or still on paper, is a for-profit company with a lease, a construction loan, or a REIT balance sheet behind it. The Peyton Family YMCA is the one exception, and it is the one that has taken the longest.
When First Coast YMCA announced the branch in 2021, the plan called for a roughly 50,000-square-foot facility, one of the system's largest, funded in part by a $7 million capital campaign and named for the Peyton family behind Gate Petroleum. The target opening was late 2023. As of March 2026 reporting, a Gate spokesperson would only say the project "remains active." No groundbreaking date. No new opening year. Just active.
That's not a knock on the YMCA or on Gate Petroleum. It's a useful reminder that a capital campaign relying on philanthropic gifts and multi-party partnerships runs on a different clock than a grocery chain deciding to lease a building it can staff and stock within months. Publix didn't need a fundraising campaign to open the SilverLeaf store. Regency Centers didn't need one to close on the Berkeley land. The YMCA does, and that difference in financing structure is probably the simplest explanation for why one project sailed past its target date while everything else on this list has either opened or stayed roughly on schedule.
What this actually means for your calendar
If you're trying to figure out what to actually plan around this year, the safe bets are the ones already open or under a hospital-grade construction schedule: the SilverLeaf Publix, Pecan Craft Kitchen, and the UF Health hospital and medical building landing this fall. The Berkeley at Durbin Park is real enough to get excited about, but Whole Foods and Shake Shack are a 2027-or-later story, not a this-year one. Sprouts, Chick-fil-A, and Life Time are still working through the review process that every one of the confirmed projects also went through first, so give them time before you count on them. And the YMCA, however long its list of amenities, is the one project on this map where "coming soon" has stopped meaning anything close to soon.
Durbin Park isn't slowing down. It's just moving on two different clocks at once, and knowing which one applies to which building is the difference between planning your week around what's real and waiting on something that's still just a press release.
If you're watching this corner of St. Johns County because you're thinking about what it means for home values, staging timelines, or the right moment to list, The Hearn Group tracks these projects as part of daily business here. Request a Free Home Valuation and we'll walk you through what the Durbin Park build-out actually means for your specific street.
