Though Hurricanes Helene and Milton killed at least 24 people in Florida, caused over an estimated $50 billion worth of damage to homes and infrastructure, and left millions of residents without water and power, Palm Beach, one of the state’s wealthiest enclaves, escaped the giant storms’ wrath. Yet all is not well in Paradise South, home to some of the nation’s wealthiest citizens.
Last February, a gunshot shattered the peace of an otherwise placid Palm Beach afternoon. While navigating heavy traffic, an impatient motorist broke a longstanding Palm Beach taboo by honking his horn. (New York this isn’t.) Another driver took umbrage, gave him the middle finger, and pointed a gun at him and two accompanying children in the car. The impatient motorist reached for his own gun and fired a shot that shattered his rival’s car window.
No one was hurt, but town police rapidly apprehended both men, neither of whom turned out to be a Palm Beach resident. Under Florida’s stand-your-ground law, the honking motorist who had fired his gun was free to go. The offended driver who had merely pointed his weapon, however, was arrested on three counts of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon without intent to kill, taken into custody, and held on $150,000 bond.
Such shootings may be rare in genteel Palm Beach, but road rage has become more common as the town’s popularity continues to grow. Even as the Covid-19 pandemic has receded, the real-estate boom fueled by island newcomers is still going strong. In 2023, according to a report issued in June by the Palm Beach County Property Appraiser’s office, the total taxable value of Palm Beach real estate increased by 10 percent to $54.68 billion, more than twice 2020’s estimate of $24.7 billion. A billion here and a billion there can, as the late senator Everett Dirksen is once reputed to have said, run into serious money. Indeed, Palm Beach’s billionaire population has also grown in recent years, from 43 in 2019 to 58 this year. Even outside the billionaire set, the price of Palm Beach living remains high. According to the Corcoran Group, average single-family home sales have averaged $11 million in every quarter since spring 2021 and still seem to be on the rise. In the second quarter of 2024, ten properties on the island sold for $35 million or more.
With popularity comes traffic, which tops the list of resident complaints surveyed by Palm Beach’s town council. While the island’s permanent population and housing stock have remained nearly stable despite the massive surge in value in recent years, the number of people and the volume of development are increasing. Slow Sunday drivers have always gawked at celebrated houses, but every weekday, those who want a taste of the local lifestyle—or who work, as many now do, in the town’s burgeoning service and financial sectors—must drive in across one of the three main bridges connecting the island to West Palm Beach. Drop-offs and pick-ups at Palm Beach Day Academy, the island’s only private school, create a twice-daily obstacle as enrollment has soared to full capacity. Many new pupils ferry back and forth in giant SUVs that old-guard residents regard with a mixture of derision and horror.
The management of Mar-a-Lago, Donald Trump’s residence and private club, represents another controversy. Entry now requires presenting a valid QR code issued by the property, which recently agreed not to host events before 5:30 p.m. most days to ameliorate traffic conditions. Even this adjustment may be moot, however. The Secret Service, reeling from its failure to secure Trump from near-assassination in July at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania, ordered the long-term closing of South Ocean Boulevard in front of the property, effectively severing Palm Beach in two. In response to enraged Palm Beachers, the town explored legal action against the Secret Service to reopen the road, but the dispute was settled in the traditional Palm Beach way: after a quiet negotiation, the Secret Service agreed to reopen the boulevard when Trump is not in residence—though between the second assassination attempt in September and Halloween, the road was only briefly reopened, during Hurricane Milton. Because South Ocean is the sole direct road link between the northern and southern ends of the island, its fate is of more than passing concern to Palm Beach’s 9,000 permanent residents. According to a study released earlier this year, an average of 38,400 cars enter the town each workday. Only 11,000 are heading for leisure activities.
The challenge is palpable for a community that once had only one traffic light, which was taken down and placed in storage during the vacant summer season. These old days inspired a joke about a “Palm Beach traffic jam”: two Rolls-Royces waiting to turn onto Worth Avenue, the island’s lone shopping street. That joke is obsolete. Evening rush hour now starts early. On many afternoons, the line of cars seeking to cross Southern Boulevard Bridge near Mar-a-Lago, recently replaced after a five-year construction project that cost over $100 million, backs up for nearly a mile along South Ocean Boulevard—the thoroughfare home to estates worth tens of millions of dollars that are often blocked by lines of cars emitting exhaust fumes into their well-manicured hedges.
Residents are up in arms. So are the town authorities who deal with them at town council meetings. Traffic reform proposals have been seeping into cocktail party chat normally reserved for boats, golf, and fine dining. The traffic has become a major item in letters to the editor in the Palm Beach Daily News (known locally as the “Shiny Sheet” for its high-grade paper, which does not smudge its readers’ fingers with unsightly newsprint). Some residents would like to limit the hours that trucks can enter town to service seemingly endless renovation projects. Others favor a congestion fee on non-residents seeking to cross the bridges, evoking New York City’s recently abandoned plan to impose one on drivers.
Congestion fees are not coming to Palm Beach, but other contentious changes have arrived. Beginning this fall, free public parking was totally phased out in the island’s midtown section, home to nearly all of its shops and restaurants. In addition to the nominal hourly fee, newly installed digital parking meters often prove baffling to town residents, whose average age approaches 70. Parking-enforcement vehicles are becoming a more common sight, with violators facing enforced fines. The few private lots are fiercely protected by signs announcing increasingly belligerent threats to tow unauthorized vehicles. A paid lot recently raised its hourly rate by 60 percent, citing rising costs.
Beginning in November 2023, as part of a seven-point town parking plan, residents could buy for a $50 annual fee a town-issued parking decal (limited to two per household) with the town’s stylized “B” logo, which allows them to park in any paid parking space for two hours. The color is meant to change each year, but the inaugural decal, a pastel pink matching some of the island’s iconic buildings, has proven popular. “The whole idea is to solve the parking problem . . . but to do it in a way that puts residents first,” Town Council member Lew Crampton said. “I think for residents the stickers will be a kind of badge of residency.” Fifty bucks isn’t much to the average Palm Beacher, but one unintended way in which the sticker puts residents “first” is to identify their cars off the island—perhaps making them targets for the exaggerated whiplash claims that sometimes afflict motorists only after accident reports identify their counterparties as Palm Beach residents.
Even these measures have not solved the problem. Neither did a detailed $417,000, year-long traffic study that the town commissioned in early 2023 from Miami’s Corradino Group. Some Town Council members alleged that the 700-page survey underestimated growth, omitted certain development projects, and mistimed afternoon rush hour. On the other hand, Joe Corradino, the consulting firm’s principal, diplomatically noted that Palm Beach residents may have a lower tolerance for traffic than ordinary Americans. “In Palm Beach,” he said when his firm’s first report was sent back for revisions, “it appears that for the driving public the tolerable capacity for the roadway network is not what is stated on the comprehensive plan.”
A revised report arrived in late June, but tempers have continued to flare. Development projects—especially for new construction and businesses—have attracted heightened scrutiny. Raising hackles were an ongoing renovation of the town’s historic, but long-disused, Royal Poinciana Playhouse into an arts complex with dining and retail space. A similar renovation of a historic town fire station resulted in the building’s near-total demolition. Lester Woerner, an entrepreneur and 20-year Palm Beach resident, purchased and has been planning an adaptation of Palm Beach’s historic Paramount Theatre, once a storied performance space but now used for shops, offices, and a church. But he has faced multiple denials for plans to preserve and renovate the building. His original plan to build private residences, restaurants, underground parking, and a social club have been scaled back due to concerns about the traffic it would likely add to the already congested neighborhood. At an inconclusive town council meeting that went on for five hours, a local condominium president warned that “this project is fraught with peril for the safety and tranquility of our quiet residential neighborhood.” Another rejection went to court.
Woerner’s frustration is compounded by the apparent lack of constraints on the booming development in West Palm Beach, just across the Intracoastal Waterway that separates the island from the mainland. While West Palm has traditionally been known as the home of the working class who serve Palm Beach’s wealthy residents, Stephen Ross, the billionaire real-estate developer and Miami Dolphins owner, is seeking to change all that. Hoping to turn West Palm Beach into a major financial hub and model city, Ross is not just dramatically changing its skyline but also attracting to West Palm prominent educational, medical, and cultural institutions.
In August, the West Palm Beach City Commission voted unanimously to donate to Vanderbilt $12.8 million of city land—some two acres—for the Tennessee-based university’s new 300,000-square foot, $520 million business school. Ross, whose company already owns about two-thirds of the city’s commercial office space, is leading the effort to raise $300 million for Vanderbilt’s new campus. “Every great city needs a great university,” he said in an interview this summer. “You could not find a better school than Vanderbilt.”
And Ross could not find a more supportive, pro-development mayor than Keith James, elected in 2019. Unlike his counterpart in Palm Beach, James appears unconcerned by critics fearful of new skyscrapers and newcomers, or who warn that infrastructure can’t keep pace with population growth. The city’s downtown population has already doubled since 2008, the Downtown Development Authority says, from an estimated 6,000 to 7,500 to as much as 15,000.
West Palm’s explosive growth may delight local officials, but it worries neighboring Palm Beach. At least one gun has gone off in Palm Beach, after all, and the island is far from calm.
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