Boca’s 30 year focus on downtown growth has resulted in 30 years of missed growth opportunity elsewhere. For decades, Boca Raton’s elected City Council has spent year after year pursuing an urban downtown vision through multiple revisions to Ordinance 4035. That vision was myopically biased on growth to the historic downtown Boca core.
At a gross level, the strategy made sense. A vibrant mixed-use urban redevelopment area signals economic strength. It creates a recognizable center. It aligns with trends seen across South Florida and the country. But looking back today and reflecting on how Boca has grown over the last three decades, an uncomfortable question emerges about past Boca leadership:
Did past Boca Raton leaders simply get it wrong over the last few decades by overemphasizing the importance of downtown Boca’s growth for the future of Boca and miss the opportunity presented by Boca’s uniquely superior basis for growth?
While downtown Boca became a black hole for policy attention, time, incentives, political energy and developer driven redevelopment, a large area of Boca quietly sat with far greater structural advantages to redevelop into Boca’s primary walkable mixed-use redevelopment area currently called the “LIRP” (named after its Light Industrial Research Park zoning).
FWIW, when the city needed more space for city offices, the LIRP was the logical place to do so and chose to purchase a building in the heart of the LIRP.
Where is Boca’s LIRP?
For those unfamiliar, the LIRP area is the area on the West side of the Yamato Road exit on I-95 as depicted by the map shown here. The former IBM campus, rebranded “BRIC”, has historically has been considered part of the LIRP area.
Unlike downtown Boca:
- The LIRP is notably not surrounded by Boca single-family neighborhoods.
- The LIRP is woven around a mature network of high speed/high volume roads.
- The LIRP has a station on the Tri-Rail commuter train system.
The Transportation Reality: Yamato (LIRP) vs. Palmetto (Downtown)
Start with the most basic constraint: How people get in and out of the LIRP. The LIRP has a surplus of driving lanes with right of way to expand. There is direct I-95 access off of Congress Ave on the North, Yamato Road at the waist and Spanish River at the South. Yamato Road serves as the main route into the LIRP. It’s built like a true regional corridor operating at four lanes in each direction, with turning capacity, signal spacing, and right-of-way that anticipates future growth and expansion. Besides Yamato, LIRP has secondary I-95 exits on Spanish River Boulevard and Congress with three lanes each.
Downtown Boca operates very differently. Downtown Boca has no direct highway access and is nearly two miles away from Interstate 95. The primary access point, Palmetto Park Road, funnels regional traffic through a constrained road that narrows to two lanes on each side as it approaches the core and is interrupted by three intersections (FEC Railroad, Dixie Hwy, US1) in the final blocks to the downtown. In key segments, you are effectively dealing with two functional through lanes in each direction. Intersections are constantly constrained.
Palmetto requires squeezing more demand into a heavily constrained network. Yamato was built to absorb it.
The opportunity for widening Palmetto Park Road is limited by a lack of adjacent right of way, and is severely constrained by built-out parcels, including many existing homes directly on Palmetto Park Road. This is not just a traffic issue. It is a structural ceiling on growth that could cost hundreds of millions of dollars to fix. And, there many great Boca neighborhoods that are against road expansion. To sum it up, Palmetto requires squeezing more demand into a heavily constrained network. Yamato was built to absorb it.
The Land Equation: Lot Size Scale Matters
Modern mixed-use and high-rise development increasingly depends on large, unified sites. Downtown Boca is ill suited to this. It is fragmented. Parcels are small. Assemblage is difficult, expensive, and politically sensitive.
By contrast, the LIRP was built on a different era’s logic, when IBM established its sprawling campus in Boca Raton in the 1960s and 70s. When IBM fully exited the site in 1996, it left behind something rare in South Florida: A large-scale, contiguous future development footprint. Additionally, a majority of the LIRP parcels were developed on multiple acres with large surface parking lots which doesn’t require the effort for smaller lot assemblages that are required in downtown. This is Boca’s missed growth advantage and uniqueness over its South Florida counterparts.
The kind of development the LIRP is uniquely suited for is:
- True mixed-use multi-building campuses
- Integrated mixed-use residential and office towers with internal circulation
- Walkable districts built from scratch rather than retrofitted
In short, the kind of projects cities now compete to attract.
Alternative Public Transit: Present vs. Hypothetical
Transit is often cited as a reason to prioritize downtown. But in Boca, the reality is more nuanced. Properties within the LIRP have access to a Tri-Rail stop located in the heart of LIRP. Tri-Rail is a functioning regional and affordable commuter public rail system connecting Palm Beach, Broward, and Miami-Dade counties (including Miami International Airport). In addition to that, the county Palm Tran system runs through the LIRP and in 2024, the City of Boca Raton launched a shuttle system that laces the entire BRiC campus with connectivity to the Tri-rail station.
Conversely, downtown Boca’s long-term transit aspirations is dependent on future expansion and funding decisions that are not guaranteed. The Brightline, a private rail, exists but the staying power is unknown, and the frequency/costs do not make sense for a lot of commuters. If the goal is to eventually add public transit to the CSX lines the Brightline currently utilizes, how does that process look and is this more than a decade-long wait and see approach?
Planning for growth based on infrastructure that exists today is fundamentally different from planning based on hopeful infrastructure that doesn’t exist today and may never exist.
The Growth Opportunity – Conclusion
For roughly the last three decades, Boca Raton concentrated much of its growth strategy in a downtown area constrained by limited roadway capacity, fragmented land ownership, and uncertain future transit options.
Meanwhile, the LIRP quietly developed many of the characteristics planners typically seek in a major mixed use district:
- Direct highway access
- Large redevelopment sites
- Existing regional transit infrastructure
- High capacity road network
- Room to grow
The question facing Boca today is not whether the City should grow, but how the city should grow. Should growth continue the 30 year history in areas built past reasonable physical limits or shift to areas ripe to accommodate it? That is the growth opportunity.
That question takes on new significance as a new City Council majority reshapes Boca’s development conversation. In Part 2 of this series, I examine additional advantages that make the LIRP uniquely positioned for future growth, including its compatibility with surrounding land uses and its redevelopment potential. I also explore how Boca’s new City Council can turn the LIRP from a missed opportunity into the City’s next economic engine.
