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The proposed American Dream Miami has 40 percent more space than the Mall of America in Minnesota

America has never seen the kind of mega mall planned for Northwest Miami-Dade.

Recent regulatory documents filed by the developer of American Dream Miami, a 200-acre shopping and entertainment complex proposed near Miami Lakes, insist the project is so large and varied that traditional planning and traffic formulas fall short of offering a template for how the attraction would operate on what’s now vacant land where Interstate 75 meets Florida’s Turnpike.

Even Minnesota’s Mall of America, the country’s biggest shopping theme park and widely cited as the closest thing to an American Dream peer, offers only a fraction of what the developer of both projects wants to bring to Miami-Dade. The documents show developer Triple Five wants American Dream to cover 6.2 million square feet of floor space, about 40 percent larger than the Mall of America’s 4.4-million-square-foot presence in Bloomington, Minnesota.

A big difference comes from the actual shopping areas, with American Dream planning to have about 1 million more square feet of retail than the Mall of America has. But the planning documents also show American Dream betting much more heavily on the theme-park side of the business, with about a quarter of the layout taken up by rides, an indoor ski slope, mini submarines and other entertainment options.

At the Mall of America, less than 15 percent of the space falls under the entertainment category. American Dream also is slated to have a 2,000-room hotel, which would be the largest in Miami-Dade.

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