Twenty-eight years too early is how developer Stephen Ross describes his firm’s arrival in West Palm Beach, the Florida city he’s now helping transform with a trio of new office towers, ultra-luxury condos, and soon, a university.
Two-plus decades ago, the mega-developer and founder of Related Cos. struggled just to lease, and re-lease, retail space in the city’s downtown amid high turnover.
“You couldn’t keep tenants because there wasn’t enough year-round business,” said Kenneth Himmel, president of Related Ross, the Florida-centric firm spun off from New York City’s Related. “Everything was fine during the winter . . . and then in the summertime, there was no one.”
What a difference a few decades — and a pandemic — make.
While Miami may grab headlines with blingy condo towers and island enclaves, the bigger urban transformation post-COVID is happening 70 miles north in West Palm Beach — a city of 124,000 that’s becoming a co-mecca for the nation’s wealth.
“It almost overnight became an extension of the old Palm Beach,” said Rick Rose, who gives walking tours of that opulent town’s historic Worth Avenue — and owns a vacation rental business in West Palm Beach — just across the Intracoastal Waterway. He’s doubled the number of homes he manages for investors in recent years.
The number of millionaires in Palm Beach and West Palm Beach combined grew 93% in the decade through 2023, the third largest increase in the US behind Austin and Scottsdale, according to advisory firm Henley & Partners. The Palm Beaches have attracted millionaires at a greater rate in the past 10 years than Greenwich and Darien, the tony Connecticut coastline towns where Wall Street money traditionally settles.
Well-heeled newcomers pushed Palm Beach County to the top of the pile in the national reshuffling of affluence. Between 2020 and 2021 new residents to the county (with West Palm as its seat) brought $7.03 billion in new taxable income — more than any other place in the U.S., according to the Economic Innovation Group. In 2022 (the latest data available) households moving into Palm Beach County had an average adjusted gross income of $260,100 — far higher than Miami-Dade’s $175,600, according to the Miami Association of Realtors.
These new arrivals are not just buying gated enclaves for leisurely weekends on the water. They’re moving their businesses and employees with them, taking up prime office space in West Palm Beach —and triggering the development of more. They’re inspiring a boomlet of new luxury condos (with Manhattan prices and pedigrees) along the city’s waterfront.
And they’re luring in a college. This week, Nashville’s Vanderbilt University presented plans for a $520 million graduate school campus focused on business and artificial intelligence. Wealthy locals, including Related’s Ross, are raising $300 million to help the university build out that campus, which Vanderbilt estimates could create 35,000 local jobs over 25 years.
“I hate to use the words ‘good’ and ‘COVID’ in the same sentence,” said West Palm Beach Mayor Keith James, in an interview after he’d attended an April groundbreaking for a condo tower where prices start at $5.9 million. “But COVID had been good to the city,” he said.
What may have started with Ken Griffin’s Citadel operating its hedge fund from the Palm Beach Four Seasons during 2020’s COVID lockdown, has yielded a more enduring and conventional workforce across the water in West Palm Beach in 2024. Goldman Sachs, BlackRock, and Steven A. Cohen’s firm, Point72, have opened offices there.
In May, JPMorgan Chase, the nation’s largest bank, said it too would establish a West Palm presence, with a new 13,000-square-foot space in Related’s 360 Rosemary tower. Hotelier Richard Born, whose BD Hotels owns the Mercer and the Bowery hotels in Manhattan, is…