Ask someone in Providencia Park what's happening to the hospital and you'll get a confident answer. Two condo towers. A hotel. The old building coming down. Most of it is true, eventually. None of it has been filed with the city yet.
Meanwhile, a few blocks north on Flagler Drive, actual cranes have been turning since February.
Providencia Park sits just north of West Palm Beach's downtown, a quiet grid of historic homes tucked between the Intracoastal Waterway and the rest of the city's north end, according to the city's own description of the Brelsford Park and Providencia Park target area. It's also the first residential neighborhood you hit heading north on North Flagler Drive, which means it's the neighborhood absorbing the most conversation, and the most confusion, about what's actually rising along the water this year.
Here's the distinction worth making before the next dinner party debate: what's under construction and what's still a rendering are not the same list.
What's Actually Got a Crane on It
Start at 1717 North Flagler Drive, a short distance north of the park. That's where Related Group and BH Group broke ground in February 2026 on the Ritz-Carlton Residences, West Palm Beach, a 27-story, 138-unit tower designed by Arquitectonica with interiors by Rockwell Group. This is real in the way permits and loans make something real. Madison Realty Capital closed a $200 million construction loan on the project, and Related's condominium division has pointed to more than $150 million in sales within the first six months of marketing, on a building that's now over 70 percent presold. Completion is targeted for 2028.
A few blocks further, at 1901 North Flagler Drive, Related Ross is building Shorecrest, a 28-story, 199-unit tower designed by Roger Ferris and Partners with prices spanning roughly $1 million to $6 million. This site has a specific history worth knowing. It's the waterfront campus of Temple Israel, a congregation that marked 100 years in West Palm Beach and had occupied the site since 1953. The congregation voted in December 2024 to sell roughly two-thirds of its 1.8-acre property to Related Ross for $30 million, with the temple relocating elsewhere in the city. Groundbreaking was targeted for early 2026, with completion also slated for 2028.
Further north still, at 4714 North Flagler Drive, Alba Palm Beach is the closest of the group to actually opening. The 22-story, 55-unit building, developed by BGI Companies and Blue Road Group and designed by Spina O'Rourke and Partners, was originally targeted for a spring 2026 delivery.
Here's how that lines up against the project everyone actually asks about.
| Project | Address | Status | Scale |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ritz-Carlton Residences | 1717 N. Flagler Dr. | Broke ground Feb. 2026, targeting 2028 | 27 stories, 138 units |
| Shorecrest | 1901 N. Flagler Dr. | Groundbreaking targeted early 2026, targeting 2028 | 28 stories, 199 units |
| Alba Palm Beach | 4714 N. Flagler Dr. | Under construction, originally targeted spring 2026 | 22 stories, 55 units |
| Good Samaritan campus | 1309 N. Flagler Dr. | Announced Feb. 2026, no site plan filed as of early 2026 | New hospital plus two condo towers (reports vary: 25 to 30 stories) |
The One With No Filed Application
The Good Samaritan Medical Center campus sits at 1309 North Flagler Drive, closer to Providencia Park than any of the three towers actually under construction. It's also the project generating the most conversation and the least paperwork.
What's been announced, through Tenet Healthcare's Palm Beach Health Network and a new development entity called Easton Street Capital, is a $2 billion to $3 billion transformation of roughly 27 acres. The plan calls for a new hospital, expected to double the height of the current building, replacing a facility that has served the community since 1920. Inpatient capacity would grow from around 175 beds to approximately 225. Around the new hospital, the concept includes workforce housing, a hotel, and two luxury condominium towers designed by Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, the architecture firm behind some of the tallest buildings in the world.
Even the basic dimensions of those condo towers aren't settled. Some reporting puts them at 25 stories with roughly 150 units apiece. Other tracking of the plan puts the height closer to 28 to 30 stories. That kind of spread between sources isn't a reporting error so much as a symptom of where the project actually sits in the pipeline: a vision, not a permit. As of early 2026, the project's residential and hospitality components had not been formally approved by the city, and no site plan had been filed.
That's an important distinction for anyone living within walking distance. A hospital replacement with committed capital and a licensed operator is a different kind of certainty than two condo towers that exist mostly as renderings and press quotes. One of these things is scheduled. The other is still being negotiated in a room nobody in Providencia Park has been invited into yet.
Whose Alarm Is It, Really
The loudest public alarm about all this construction so far hasn't come from West Palm Beach. It came from across the bridge.
At a Palm Beach Town Council meeting in early August 2026, planning staff presented council members with GIS mapping showing more than 100 projects planned, approved, under construction, or completed in downtown West Palm Beach, clustered largely along Flagler Drive and south of Palm Beach Lakes Boulevard. That's the exact stretch Providencia Park sits inside. One council member put it bluntly:
"I'm horrified because of our traffic issue with this much going up. We just don't have the road capacity."
Residents on both sides of the Intracoastal echoed the concern. One West Palm Beach resident described getting stuck in traffic constantly. Another, asked to sum up the city's traffic situation in a single word, said "tragic." A third pointed to how bridge access already slows to a crawl when A1A closes for presidential visits, turning what should be a few minutes into twenty or more.
Palm Beach's town officials were careful to note they have no authority to stop or alter any of this. Each municipality operates under its own home rule authority, meaning the island can voice concern but can't veto a single tower on the West Palm Beach side of the water. West Palm Beach's own Downtown Master Plan update, meanwhile, is currently paused following pushback from residents on the WPB side, some of whom have raised the same overdevelopment concerns in their own words. In response, the city has stood up a coalition of roughly 30 neighborhood associations now meeting weekly with city staff to track what's coming.
Providencia Park residents live inside the exact corridor everyone else is debating, which makes that new weekly coalition worth watching for anyone here who wants a direct line to city staff as the plans firm up.
What a Walk Up Flagler Actually Looks Like This Year
If you're walking or driving north from the park this year, here's the honest version. Past 1309, the Good Samaritan campus looks the same as it has for decades, low-slung and unremarkable next to what's coming later. At 1717, there's active vertical construction, the kind with a real fence line and a real crane, on a building that's already sold more than $150 million worth of units before anyone's moved in. At 1901, the waterfront campus a congregation called home for over seventy years is now sold and slated to become Shorecrest's foundation. Further up, Alba is the nearest thing to finished, a building that may already be welcoming residents by the time this posts, depending on how construction timelines held through the summer.
None of that requires speculation about permits that haven't been filed. It's simply what's physically happening along a half-mile of waterfront this year, project by project, address by address.
The bigger story, the hospital campus with its condo towers and hotel and longevity center, is worth watching closely precisely because it isn't locked in yet. Plans at this stage can shrink, grow, or stall entirely depending on what the city approves. For a neighborhood that's about to spend the next few years living next to whatever gets built, knowing the difference between a groundbreaking and a rendering isn't a small thing. It's the difference between planning around what's coming and reacting to a headline that got ahead of the paperwork.
Work With Elizabeth
For residents and owners in Providencia Park who want a clear-eyed read on how this stretch of Flagler Drive is likely to change property values, traffic patterns, and daily life over the next several years, Elizabeth DeWoody tracks these projects block by block, not just headline by headline.
