Palm Beach Post, March 8, 2025
By Andrew Marra

The city’s Community Redevelopment Agency agreed to spend $5.5 million to purchase a half-acre warehouse site on Fern Street near the intersection with Tamarind Avenue. 

Hoping to head off worsening traffic in a booming area, West Palm Beach is buying up property to build a road connecting downtown to the growing Clear Lake district.

The city’s Community Redevelopment Agency agreed Monday to spend $5.5 million to purchase a half-acre warehouse site on Fern Street near the intersection with Tamarind Avenue.

The property at 914 Fern Street is key to the city’s plans to extend Fern Street across railroad tracks to Australian Avenue by connecting it with a small two-block road called Clearwater Place.

The effort comes as the Clear Lake district — the sliver of land between Clear Lake and the CSX tracks — becomes the site of increased development interest.

December saw the groundbreaking of the Berkeley Palm Beach, a 25-story luxury lakefront condominium building on Australian Avenue just south of Clearwater Place.

And February brought the news that the Cleveland Clinic had signed a contract to buy property on Australian Avenue just north of Clearwater Place, where it plans to build a 150-bed hospital.

Developers are also hoping to move forward soon with plans for Transit Village, a $1.3 billion, 6-acre mixed-use project on Clearwater Drive and South Tamarind Avenue.

Those and other projects in the area — including a Vanderbilt University business school campus downtown, just north of Fern Street — promise to increase the need for routes between the two districts. Currently, no road crosses the tracks in the eight-block stretch between Okeechobee Boulevard and Banyan Boulevard.

Project could remove more than 11,000 cars a day from nearby roads

Buying the property is necessary because Fern Street sits more than a half-block north of Clearwater Place, so connecting the two roads requires bending the FernStreet extension “down to the south to make sort of an S-curve there,” said Kevin Volbrecht, the city’s director of engineering services.

Volbrecht told commissioners Monday that extending Fern Street across the tracks would remove an estimated 11,000 vehicles a day from Okeechobee Boulevard and Banyan Boulevard during peak traffic hours.

“This is obviously going to be a tremendous benefit for the city and for all of the commuters in and out of the city,” he said.

The $5.5 million price tag for the property is well above the appraised value of $1.7 million assigned to it by the county property appraiser. CRA executive director Chris Roog told commissioners the price was negotiated down during talks with the owner.

“We essentially had to come up with a price that did incentivize the owner to relinquish the property for the road,” he said.

City commissioner Christina Lambert called the price “a worthy investment” given the traffic relief it would bring to a fast-developing part of the city.

“It seems like a fair amount for the amount of trips were going to be diverting,” she said.

Traffic relief from the extension is still at least three years away, though.

Roog told commissioners that they expect construction work to start in late 2027 and for the new roadway to be finished sometime in 2028.

Andrew Marra is a reporter at The Palm Beach Post. Reach him atamarra@pbpost.com.