The Height Fight Moved One Block North: What the $3 Billion Good Samaritan Plan Means for North Flagler Condos

Three days ago West Palm Beach's Downtown Action Committee advanced a Downtown Master Plan Update that removed the 25-story waterfront height incentive and left most of the Flagler Drive waterfront capped at five stories. For owners on the downtown waterfront, that settled the question that had been hanging over the corridor all summer.

It did not settle it for everyone. About a mile and a half north, a 27-acre hospital campus at 1309 North Flagler Drive is the subject of a $2 billion to $3 billion redevelopment proposal that includes two 25-story condominium towers. That site sits outside the Downtown Master Plan area — by one property line. None of the protections in the plan you just read about apply to it.

This is what is proposed, where the zoning line actually falls, and what it means if you own or are buying on North Flagler Drive.

What Is Actually Proposed

In February 2026, Tenet Healthcare's Palm Beach Health Network announced a long-term partnership with Easton Street Capital — a firm formed by two principals of the Palm Beach-based Frisbie Group — to redevelop the Good Samaritan Medical Center campus. The announced components:

• A replacement hospital, roughly 10 stories, built immediately west of the existing five-story building. Inpatient capacity goes from about 175 beds to about 225, with expanded cardiac, cancer, surgical, neuroscience and pediatric programs. The current hospital stays open through construction.
• A medical office tower on the campus.
• Two 25-story for-sale condominium towers, each with approximately 150 residences — about 300 units in total.
• A hotel for patients and visitors.
• Rental housing for hospital employees.
• A mixed-use complex on the footprint of the current hospital once it is demolished — restaurants, retail, and a longevity center offering genetic and metabolic profiling, cardiac imaging and related preventative services.

Total announced investment is $2 billion to $3 billion. Construction on the hospital is targeted to begin by mid-2027, with an estimated 30-month buildout. The residential and retail phases follow the hospital, because the old building cannot come down until the new one opens.

For scale: this is a larger announced investment than any single condominium project on the North Flagler corridor, and the residential component alone would add roughly as many new units as Olara is delivering at 1919 North Flagler.

The Line at Palm Beach Lakes Boulevard

Here is the part that has been reported loosely, and it matters more than anything else in the proposal.

Press coverage has described the site as "downtown West Palm Beach." In planning terms it is not. The Downtown Master Plan area ends at Palm Beach Lakes Boulevard where the boulevard meets the water, and the Good Samaritan campus begins on the north side of that line. The city's own zoning and Downtown Master Plan mapping puts the campus outside the plan boundary and zones it CSPD — Community Service Planned Development, the classification used for institutional campuses rather than for downtown's district-by-district height rules.

Three consequences follow from that.

First, the Downtown Master Plan Update does not govern this site. The five-story cap in the Flagler Waterfront District, the eight-story allowance north of Banyan, the removal of the 25-story incentive — none of it reaches north of Palm Beach Lakes Boulevard. A Good Samaritan application would not be heard on the Downtown Master Plan Update's calendar. It would be its own rezoning, with its own hearings.

Second, the site is not zoned for towers today. CSPD is a planned-development classification built around a hospital campus. Getting to 25 stories requires the city to approve a change, and that approval is discretionary. This is the single biggest open variable in the entire proposal.

Third — and this is the detail almost nobody has connected — the campus shares its southern property line with the most restrictive district in the entire Downtown Master Plan. That is the Providencia Park District, which the city's comprehensive plan describes as a residential waterfront neighborhood with single-family homes of historic significance whose scale and character shall be preserved. Its zoning subdistricts, PPD-R and PPD-PO, permit a maximum of three stories. Unlike almost every other downtown district, they carry no incentive height whatsoever — there is no bonus path to a taller building there, at any density, under any conditions.

So the proposal puts two 25-story towers on a parcel that touches a three-story district, on the waterfront, in the same season the city removed a 25-story waterfront incentive a mile to the south. Whatever one thinks of the project, that is the context any city commissioner will be voting in.

What It Means If You Own on North Flagler

The corridor between Palm Beach Lakes Boulevard and the north end of Billionaires Row is where most of the new waterfront product in this city has landed. If you own there, the Good Samaritan proposal touches you in three distinct ways, and they do not all point the same direction.

Construction, first and longest. A 30-month hospital build starting in mid-2027 puts heavy equipment on the 1300 block of North Flagler into roughly 2030, followed by demolition of the existing hospital and then the residential and retail phases. That is a long horizon. The buildings closest to it — Flagler Pointe at 1801 North Flagler, The Ritz-Carlton Residences at 1717, Shorecrest at 1865, and Olara at 1919 — are all within about half a mile. Buildings further north, including Portofino North at 2600, Alba Palm Beach at 4714 and Mandarin Oriental Residences at 5400, are far enough up the corridor that the construction impact is a traffic question rather than a daily one.

Views and sightlines. This is the real variable. Two 25-story towers on the 1300 block would sit south of the buildings listed above and on the same side of Flagler Drive, with the Intracoastal across the road to the east. For a residence with southern exposure in that stretch, the proposal matters. For a residence oriented east across the water toward Palm Beach, it does not. Which category you are in depends on your specific line of sight, not on your building — which is a floor-by-floor conversation, not a building-by-building one.

Amenity value. A rebuilt 225-bed hospital with expanded cardiac and cancer programs, a longevity center, and a hotel for visiting family is a genuine asset to have within walking distance, and it is the kind of thing buyers in this price range ask about directly. Olara already made concierge healthcare part of its offering. A major medical campus at the south end of the corridor strengthens that argument for the whole stretch rather than weakening it.

The honest summary: the hospital is good for the corridor, the towers are the contested part, and the construction period is long enough that timing matters if you are thinking about selling.

The Opposition, and What Is Not Yet Known

The proposal has organized opposition. A group operating as Keep West Palm Beach, at protectthepalm.com, founded by Michelle Farmer, is circulating a petition with a stated goal of 6,000 signatures along with a template letter to city commissioners. Their position is that more than 1,200 proposed units in towers of 18 to 31 stories along a single waterfront corridor is too much for the area's infrastructure and character, and they identify the Good Samaritan towers specifically as being proposed next to Providencia Park on a site not zoned for that height.

Two notes for accuracy. The group describes the towers as 28 to 30 stories; the developer announcement and the press coverage that followed it describe two 25-story towers of roughly 150 units each. And the meeting dates the group is organizing around — September 15, October 26, January 18 — are the Downtown Master Plan Update calendar, which, as above, is a separate process from any Good Samaritan application.

What is genuinely unresolved:

• Whether an application has been filed. In February the developers said they expected to submit within weeks. Reporting in March 2026 indicated no formal application had been filed with the city. We have not found a filed application on the public record as of this writing, and we will update this article when one appears.
• What the actual approval path is. A CSPD site seeking high-rise residential density outside the downtown plan area is not a routine filing, and the city has not published a process or a hearing schedule for it.
• Whether the residential component survives at that height. The hospital has a clear public case. The towers are what pays for it. How those two get weighed against a three-story district on the other side of the property line is the whole question.

The Timeline as It Stands

• February 19–20, 2026: partnership and redevelopment vision announced by Palm Beach Health Network and Easton Street Capital.
• March 2026: reporting indicates no formal application yet filed with the city.
• Mid-2027: targeted start of hospital construction, per the announcement.
• Approximately 30 months: estimated hospital buildout, putting completion around late 2029 or 2030.
• After the hospital opens: demolition of the existing building, then the mixed-use, hotel and residential phases.

Every height, unit count and date in this article is a proposal. Unlike the Downtown Master Plan Update, which has a published hearing calendar and a January 2027 final vote, this one does not yet have a clock on it.

If You Own on North Flagler Drive

Buyers ask about what is coming next door, and on this corridor the honest answer is complicated enough that most agents skip it. It should not be skipped — for a lot of residences here the answer is genuinely favorable, and for the ones where it is not, you want to know before a buyer's agent raises it. If you are weighing whether to sell before the construction window opens in 2027, that is a timing question worth running the numbers on now rather than in eighteen months. Start here and we will put a current valuation together for you.

If You Are Buying on the Corridor

Sightline, exposure and floor matter more than usual on this stretch, and no listing sheet tells you which residences are affected by a proposal that has not been filed yet. Browse the waterfront buildings one by one, or reach out and we will walk the corridor with you with the district map and the site plan in hand — including which residences in which buildings are genuinely exposed to this and which are not.

This guide is provided by DO Homes Group, a West Palm Beach real estate team. For personalized recommendations, contact our team.