Anne GeggisAt Flagler Pointe on North Flagler, high-rises to the left of them, more rising to the right and they truly don’t know what it is they should do.
Jackhammering pounds. Machinery roars. And then something screeches like metal on metal, loud enough to interrupt a conversation on an eighth-floor balcony.
But that’s not what drove Beverley Bernstein to end her morning coffee ritual while watching the sun rise from her condo overlooking Flagler Drive. It’s the high-pitched beeping of construction truck after construction truck backing up that ended her revelry.
“That sounds to me like nails on a blackboard,” said Bernstein, 69, who’s retired from preplanning funeral and cemetery services. “It’s all annoying. … When you put them all together, I could just start to cry. It robs you of peace. It robs you of joy.”
Three different buildings adding up to 81 stories are rising along a two-block stretch of North Flagler Drive, and the nine-story Flagler Pointe condo, at 1801 N. Flagler Drive, is right in the middle.
“Our building is vibrating, cabinets, dishes are shaking,” resident Fran Perchick told the city’s Planning Board Sept. 15. “Drilling, clanging, hammering, backup beeping and the sound of trucks delivering cement, etc., etc. — it really is unbearable.”
When the neighboring buildings are completed, which could be three years from now considering a fourth, Pine Street Residences, is about to break ground, the 25-year-old condo’s expansive waterfront views will be forever changed.
But even before the shadows fall, the complaints of residents have a familiar ring throughout coastal West Palm Beach which are bound to intensify as even more projects break ground.
The construction that has cranes swinging overhead is also tying up traffic, crowding residential streets and consuming limited neighborhood parking spaces.
The rules that are supposed to keep it in check have failed to stop the city’s unprecedented growth spurt from damaging the city’s quality of life, residents say.
‘Pull up the ladder’ mentality?
Fallout from the construction boom was among the laundry list of items that spurred the formation of four resident groups, organized to question how all this new square footage serves the people already living here.
Planning Board Chair Steve Mayans, who has served on that board for 17 years, dismissed the complaints as a “pull up the ladder” mentality he’s seen before about conditions that are only temporary.
“I know … the buildings some of you live in,” Mayans told a lineup of complaining residents at a recent meeting. “I remember when some of those buildings went up, and your neighbors complained and said, ‘I can’t believe you’re allowing this monstrosity in our city.’”
Undoubtedly, though, the scope of new development is megasized compared with the recent past.
Flagler Pointe’s neighbor to the south was the one-story Flagler Medical Arts Building. It’s morphing into the 27-story Ritz-Carlton Residences WPB, 1717 N. Flagler Drive. Directly north, Temple Israel of West Palm Beach is now becoming the 28-story Shorecrest Flagler Drive. To the north of Shorecrest, at 1919 N. Flagler Drive, Olara West Palm Beach is slated to rise to 26 stories.
Another project, a 14-story tower, is scheduled to break ground later this year on the adjacent city block, just north and west of Flagler Pointe.
In her Flagler Pointe condo, which Bernstein bought for $178,000 six years ago, hairline cracks in the wall began appearing not long after the commotion outside started.
Bernstein said that the rest of the city needs to take note. The work is happening so close to her that she’s had to clean hydraulic fluid from her balcony.
“There’s no concern for neighbors,” Bernstein said.
That’s not true, city spokesperson Kathleen Joy said. Residents’ concerns are “a priority,” she said.
“The city is actively working to minimize these impacts through increased coordination with developers and contractors, proposed updates to construction management regulations and expanded parking enforcement,” Joy wrote in an email. “These efforts are intended to strengthen oversight, address residents’ concerns and minimize disruptions to surrounding neighborhoods.”
Joy did not respond to a further question about steps the city has taken to update its noise and parking enforcement programs.
Construction boom fallout
In recent months, city meetings about plans to increase downtown development capacity have become resident complaint marathons focused on the impact on neighborhood parking and the strain growth is having on city services.
Fatima Sanandaji, co-founder of Save West Palm Beach, a recently formed citizen group that claims 5,700 members, said despite extensive meetings with city leaders nothing meaningful has been done to protect parking.
Dozens of major projects are due to be completed in West Palm Beach by 2029. It’s a burst of activity that ramped up during the COVID pandemic. Businesses started coming, attracted by the state’s temperate climate, lack of an income tax and fewer pandemic mandates. West Palm Beach, with the Norton Museum of Art, the Kravis Center and proximity to Palm Beach’s world famous offerings, has the bonus of cultural attractions lacking in other Florida cities.
But residents say that they need more protections from how the city is growing into its moniker, “Wall Street South,” reflecting how big names such as Goldman Sachs and Wells Fargo have moved divisions here.
“It is time for city leadership to show as much concern for the residents who have already made West Palm Beach their home as it does for those it hopes to attract,” Sanandaji said.
‘Quiet enjoyment — there is none’
City codes call for construction noise in West Palm Beach to be limited to 7 am to 7 pm, Monday through Friday, and 8 am to 8 pm on Saturdays and Sundays.
That’s more hours than New York City allows.
In Boca Raton, the next-biggest city in the county, construction noise is allowed for 65 hours per week, 19 fewer than West Palm Beach, and not on Sundays.
Boca Raton’s codes also address acceptable limits of noise, stipulating that the racket should not exceed 75 decibels for more than 10% of the time when measured from 50 feet away. On that aspect, however, West Palm Beach’s codes are silent.
From Bernstein’s eighth-floor balcony, a decibel reader recently measured an average noise level of 75 decibels. It occasionally spiked to 90, which is a level that can cause permanent hearing loss, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says.
“It’s such a shame that it’s ruined our peaceful way of life. Everyone is entitled to live in peace and tranquility,” Bernstein said. “Quiet enjoyment — there is none.”
Some construction activities, such as cement pours, cannot be contained within the permitted hours. West Palm’s code has provisions that spell out what “may” happen in those cases but not what “shall” happen.
The code states that city officials “may” sign off on any deviation from permitted hours. That deviation “may be conditioned upon notice to surrounding property owners and tenants.”
Residents of Flagler Pointe said they’ve never received such notice. Residents are quick to show time-stamped photos of construction work happening in the dark and recount nights filled with industrial noise.
‘This situation isn’t normal’
Many of them would like the city to match New York City. In the Big Apple, rules spell out how developers must submit a noise mitigation plan for projects of 200,000 square feet or more. Codes there also dictate when a construction project must install barriers that reduce noise by 10 decibels.
The city commissioner whose district includes Flagler Pointe, Cathleen Ward, told her colleagues last month that perhaps adjustments are needed when it comes to construction hours.
“We need to provide more teeth when it comes to what we’re approving … some Sundays off aren’t going to kill a project,” said Ward, who visited with Flagler Pointe residents and experienced the noise firsthand.
Later, she told Stet News that Flagler Pointe residents are in extreme circumstances and she’s asked city staff to let her know whether anything can be done.
“I absolutely feel we should be looking at our existing rules/regulations and make modifications which provide a better balance for residents living next to construction sites,” she wrote in a text message. “This situation isn’t normal.”
‘We jumped through all the hoops’
The number of construction-related complaints about parking is increasing, District 5 Commissioner Stephen Sylvester told the commission last month.
“I’m getting more and more phone calls and emails on the residents in Grandview Heights and the parking issue — they are beyond frustrated,” Sylvester said. “One called me the other day and said … now the situation’s gotten … out of hand with the contractors and construction workers that are parking there.”
In 2025, the city introduced an option that a neighborhood could apply to get “resident only” parking in their neighborhood. Three applications have been made, but just one two-block area has won approval.
Cynthia McCallister, a longtime resident of Mango Promenade, which is south of downtown, said she collected 85% of residents’ signatures, 10 percentage points more than needed, but the city still turned down the application. Subsequent data studies did not meet the required threshold to get the designation, she said she was told.
“We jumped through all the hoops,” McCallister said. “But they did their data collection at 8 pm … when there’s no construction parking.”
Margaret Frazzini, president of the Grandview Heights Neighborhood Association and West Palm Beach Neighborhood Alliance, said she’s been working on this issue for three years, generating “truckloads” of correspondence with the city.
While one part of Grandview Heights is the sole place where resident parking permits are in force, her portion of the neighborhood has been rejected.
“The city is not holding up its end of the bargain,” she said.
Developer’s parking plan hard to come by
Ideally, the city should be enforcing its management of transportation plans, known as MOTs, that developers must file before their project is approved, she said. These plans designate offsite parking where construction workers should park, but they’d rather not, she said.
“It gets tiresome,” Frazzini said, noting the trash left behind and the sight of construction workers changing their clothes on the roadside. “They park in our neighborhoods, and then they open the trunk of their car and they pull out an electric bike or an electric scooter, which they ride to the job site from the residential neighborhood. … They fly and they ride on the sidewalk, so they’re a safety issue on so many levels.
“The GCs (general contractors) are in violation of their building permits, and the city is doing nothing to enforce it,” she said.
It’s not easy to see a MOT. Stet requested on Oct. 30 that the city provide the MOT for the Mr. C’s Residences construction site, which neighbors view as a major contributor to the parking problem. Two weeks later, the city said it had no such document and that copies of the MOT for Mr. C’s are held by the Florida Department of Transportation.
Residents at Flagler Pointe, however, had a copy of the “site logistics” for the Ritz-Carlton Residences. It designated the nearby Temple Beth El as the place for workers to park.
A recent visit, while workers pounded away on the construction site, revealed the designated parking lot did not have a single car. In the early afternoon on another day, three cars were parked there.
Some residents say they have seen workers arriving in buses.
To find out, Stet put in repeated calls and texts to a spokesperson for Related Group of Miami, which is building the Ritz-Carlton, a project valued at nearly $400 million. After initially promising to provide information, he stopped responding. The general contractor, Coastal Construction, never responded.
Official: City needs citizen eyes
Before stepping down from his job as assistant city administrator, Armando Fana acknowledged that some construction management issues are getting ahead of city staff’s ability to respond.
One concern he referenced: developers closing roads for construction without city permission. Additional penalties are in the works, he said at an August workshop.
“It happened in the last two weeks where we’ve gone out and somebody closed the road on their own, and that is a hard thing to manage,” he said. “It’s like everything else, you do rely on citizens to some extent to catch people who are breaking the law. … We need to do a better job of managing that.”
Residents should not have to suffer the city’s desire to grow more, Save West Palm Beach’s Sanandaji said.
“As West Palm Beach continues to approve development after development, the city cannot keep leaving existing residents to bear the burden of unchecked construction, inadequate enforcement and deteriorating neighborhood conditions,” she said.
