Anne GeggisRelated Ross prepares $3 million move of Joel Daves’ house, one other to clear way for more downtown development.
A century-old bungalow that a former West Palm Beach mayor called home — now dwarfed by nearby luxury residential towers — sits loaded onto a moving platform, ready to make way next month for more downtown development.
Downtown was a blighted core in the 1970s when Joel Daves bought the home on 610 Evernia St. — a stark contrast to the unprecedented downtown growth spurt spurring the home’s move and producing an outcry from residents feeling squeezed by the effects of downtown’s rising square footage on roads and city services.
The potential squeeze feared back then was something different entirely.
“Everyone thought he was insane … they are like, ‘Joel why are you moving downtown? You know … it’s very dangerous!’” Daves’ daughter, Posey Kettler Daves, recalled. “But he had this vision and he poured his heart and soul into it.”
It paid off.
Daves made millions from sale of house
Fast forward 27 years from Daves’ $26,000 purchase (about $120,000 in today’s dollars):
Developer Stephen Ross’ Related Cos. paid Daves $2.85 million in 2006 for the house at Evernia and Rosemary Avenue.
Sitting between CityPlace and Clematis Street, the corner had great development potential, even if it would not be realized for 20 years.
At the time, the company envisioned that the success of its open air shopping hub, CityPlace, would feed more demand for residential development nearby, where city codes allowed buildings to rise 25 stories. The real estate crisis of the later aughts soon scuttled the sale’s original intent, but Related’s successor, Related Ross, is dusting off its maps of these city blocks at the same time it is helping to draw nationally known institutions, such as Vanderbilt University and Cleveland Clinic.
Accommodating downtown’s popularity is part of why an updated and controversial Downtown Master Plan is wending its way toward final approval. The blueprint would allow 46% more downtown square footage to be built over the next few decades.
So, this 1,030-square foot home built in the early 1900s will move sometime in October so the lot can be used for a parking lot for at least five years, Related Ross spokeswoman Maura Daves said. She is related to the former mayor by marriage.
Related already owns and has cleared the rest of the block. It is paying $3.2 million to move the former mayor’s longtime homestead and another house about a mile north to 900 Sixth St.
The plan is to fix them up and sell them as affordable housing, subsidized through Related Ross’ development business.
“The successful growth of a city includes the preservation of historic sites,” Jordan Bargas, executive vice president of Related Ross, said in a statement to Stet News. “We worked with the CRA (Community Redevelopment Agency) and the city of West Palm Beach to find a location that preserved both homes in the downtown while helping create more affordable pathways to homeownership.”
‘My dad would be very happy’
The former mayor’s daughter calls the move “one of those full-circle moments” in which her father’s vision of a thriving downtown has become reality and a downtown neighborhood he wanted to see improve is getting a boost.
“I think it’s a very impactful, powerful moment for that house to continue on its legacy there,” Kettler Daves said. “My dad would be very happy with that because … it’s a neighborhood that needs help, and it’s a neighborhood that he loved dearly and wanted to succeed and change.”
Daves, who served a two-year stint in the Florida Legislature, five years as what is now known as the county state attorney, seven years as a city commissioner and one term as mayor, died in 2021 at age 93.
How it was
Downtown’s first boom had become a bust when Daves bought his home on Evernia Street that had been part of the original city plan laid out by Henry Flagler. To screen out the blight around him, Daves cultivated an urban oasis of fruit trees and tall hedges of sea grapes and ficus, Kettler Daves recalled.
Downtown’s deteriorating state did have an impact that was “scary” at times but occasionally amusing, she said. Family lore has her climbing on her dresser as a child to yell at the people — “prostitutes on the corner of our street” and “drug deals happening across the street.”
“One of my favorite stories was that … I was just 4 years old and I wanted to sleep … so I opened my window and was yelling at the nighttime workers, ‘You better be quiet, you better be quiet,’” she said. “My mom and my dad woke up because they heard their daughter upstairs yelling, and they’re like, ‘What are you yelling at?’ And I said, ‘They’re being too loud.’”
Guard dogs helped limit the number of home break-ins to two, including one that was the result of a pilfering yard worker the family knew, Kettler Daves said.
Still, downtown West Palm Beach’s image problem wasn’t just because of selective editing of police encounters filmed and nationally aired for “Cops,” which broke ground as one of TV’s first reality shows, according to local historian Ginger Pedersen.
“I wish there was Google Street View from the ’70s or early ’80s because everything would be boarded up,” Pedersen said, attributing the decline to the migration of stores such as Burdines, which fled downtown for the Palm Beach Mall, and the closure of small, local businesses such as The Hut, a drive-in soda and sandwich shop on Flagler Drive.
It was in that bust, though, that developers, spurred by the city’s first Downtown Master Plan in 1994 — which Daves voted on — began to see the potential to change the blight into a place where whipped Nutella crunch doughnuts sell for nearly $5 apiece along with activewear commonly spotted on professional athletes and other celebrities.
The current scene
The first incarnation of CityPlace germinated in 1986 when Henry Rolfs Sr. and David Paladino began buying land in a crime-ridden area for what they called Downtown/Uptown.
Daves was among the property owners the pair approached as they collected parcels to stitch into a massive office, shopping and residential complex, but Daves rejected the offer, The Palm Beach Post reported in 1997. Despite that rejection, the pair amassed 26 blocks and 77 acres — only to see a 1990s recession scuttle their plans.
The vision got a lifeline when the city reassembled the property from dozens of lenders and invited developers to make a proposal in 1996. That’s when Related Cos.— and billionaire Stephen Ross — came on the scene.
CityPlace opened in 2000, dominated by stores with just a smattering of apartments that the developers thought they would have trouble filling. They quickly realized they were wrong.
Still, the developers looked north toward the block dominated by the mayor’s house for opportunities to expand.
While he expressed no interest in selling while in office, Daves made the sale three years after he lost his reelection bid to now-U.S. Rep. Lois Frankel. And the CityPlace developers, who built the Publix next door, held on to the property for future expansion.
They plan to tear down the Publix and build a larger grocery store on Banyan Boulevard, clearing an entire city block. Daves’ home stands in the path.
Planning Board approves master plan
Since the COVID pandemic, Ross has made downtown his obsession.
His ambitious proposals, including building two of the city’s largest office buildings on the site of CityPlace’s former movie theater, have become a rallying cry for opponents who see downtown’s quality of life eroding as conditions become more crowded and plans show some parts of the city rising higher.
“In just six years, West Palm Beach has changed dramatically, and the pace of change continues to accelerate,” said Mark Heimann, a member of Save West Palm Beach, one of the three groups that have organized to have their say in downtown’s design.
“We are deciding what kind of city West Palm Beach will become. Will it remain a livable city with a strong sense of community and an excellent quality of life, or will it become a city overwhelmed by growth that was approved before its consequences were fully understood?”
But memories of a time when no one wanted to be downtown, except for Joel Daves, helped persuade Planning Board members on Sept. 15 to brush aside objections to the city’s plan to increase downtown’s development potential.
Just 36 years ago, the city led the country in crime for cities its size, not a single restaurant had a door on Clematis Street, and traffic was so sparse that one could drive through downtown without tapping the brakes, Planning Board Chairman Steven Mayans said.
“It’s been a remarkable journey for this city, and a lot of us are thrilled to see it,” he said during the Sept. 15 meeting. “I think people are voting with their feet, because they are coming here, they are coming here.”
The master plan is scheduled to get an up or down vote when the City Commission meets Oct. 26. A public workshop is scheduled for 5:30 p.m,, Oct. 6 at City Hall.
