Boca Raton's New Leaders Throwing 'All Kinds Of Curveballs' At Developers

Palm Beach County's influx of wealth and businesses has made the 101-year-old city of Boca Raton a target for redevelopment, but developers and city officials are clashing over which way the city should evolve. 

Boca residents rejected a $1B development and elected a new mayor and three council members in March, removing the council’s previously developer-friendly majority as debates over downtown redevelopment grew.

City officials have passed restrictive ordinances in direct response to project proposals, and developers are finding that shifting expectations are making building in the city harder to justify, especially as macroeconomic pressures on construction costs, lending and insurance grow, they said Tuesday at Bisnow’s Boca Raton State of the Market event.

“When you’re hit with all kinds of curveballs and changes and things that you know the code allows it, that’s when things start to get a bit more complicated,” Red-C Group CEO and founder Noam Ziv said onstage. “At the end of the day, it scares away some developers.”

Boca Raton has long been considered a premier retirement haven. But, like many South Florida cities that have drawn in wealthy business leaders and companies following the pandemic, it has been rapidly changing.

The city’s population has grown more than 4% since 2020 to 102,502. Boca has more than 12,000 businesses, placing it among the top 20 small cities in the U.S. for potential career growth, according to CoWorking Cafe.

By 2024, more than 100 hotels, schools, hospitals, condos, offices and mixed-use communities were under construction, planned or proposed in the city, the South Florida Business Journal reported.

The city entered 2026 with a pipeline of nearly 50 projects under review, the Boca Post reported.

Tensions over how much Boca was growing came to a head earlier this year.

Coconut Grove-based Terra Group and Frisbie Group struck a deal with the city to redevelop the city government's office campus with a 2.5M SF project with a hotel, a grocery store and nearly 1,000 residences called One Boca.

In a 4-1 vote in January, the city council approved sending the deal to voters in March. The development was rejected, with nearly three-quarters of voters opposed.

The vote followed months of pushback led by political group Save Boca, founded by Jon Pearlman, a former Harvard tennis player who residents elected as one of the three new city council members.

The other two council members elected were Michelle Grau, also endorsed by Save Boca, and Marc Widger, who supported the development but pushed for refinements to the project and its approval process, Florida Politics reported.

Andy Thomson won the race for mayor by five votes. Thomson had served on the city council for roughly six years and was the only one to vote against the One Boca project just three months prior.

“The last election kind of took this down from pro-development, but responsible development, to no development,” Ziv said.

Within a month, Boca passed the “Save Boca law,” which requires voter approval on the sale or lease of any city-owned land greater than half an acre.

“There's a lot of new people on the council,” Council Member Yvette Drucker said. “It's a very hard job to come in if you haven't had past experience in governance or in kind of development.”

"We're just trying to pivot," she added. "We're trying to work together as a body."

Drucker, who has been on the council for six years, said the city is ripe for redevelopment that adds vibrancy, especially in the entertainment and arts sector.

Following the election, Drucker called business members within the community to assure them the city wasn't shutting out business.

“I want people to stay in our city, and I want those monies to come back to the city,” Drucker said. “So, did we have a hiccup? We did. Are we here now? We are. Are we moving forward? We are. And anytime I can advocate for that, I will.”

Ziv, who is behind the development of the 28-unit Glass House Boca Raton condo building, said he supports additional considerations when involving public land use, but the reaction has swung the pendulum too far away from the development the city needs.

To justify building or redevelopment in the city, which has a shortage of developable land, developers rely on maximizing density and building more than what was already there to make the project financially viable.

Going higher than the city’s standard height limit — about 100 feet, with a 40-foot bonus if developers adhere to certain architectural guidelines — could help alleviate that pressure, Ziv said.

“Putting back the same building isn't the transformation that's going to help the city grow and become the best city that we want to all live and work in,” Pebb Enterprises Senior Vice President of Construction and Development Evan Rosenblatt said.

“So, I think the goal is not to build the most you can. The goal is to find and build a sense of place.”

Financing projects is arguably harder than ever as construction costs rise and long-term interest rates stay elevated amid stubborn inflation. Longer timelines to get projects approved choke their viability.

"I cannot tell you how many deals I underwrote in the last couple of years in downtown, and I just can't make it work," Ziv said.

"The only trick that we have with so many unknowns, and one of the unknowns is the density," he added. "Otherwise, it's just not working. So if a city is not wanting to do that, that's perfectly fine. But then the city cannot expect to see that growth."