Before the pandemic, generational wealth migration and the seemingly endless stream of headlines about Steve Ross transforming West Palm Beach, there was Jeff Greene.
He saw a diamond in the rough more than a decade ago.
“Sitting in my private plane at the airport, it struck me that there were 300 to 400 other private jets there,” he told The Real Deal in a 2016 interview. “How can a city with this much wealth and education have so few amazing buildings, restaurants and hotels?”
The billionaire real estate investor laid out his plans for reinventing the coastal city. By that point, he’d amassed a 75-acre portfolio in West Palm Beach and was dreaming up apartments, condos, a hotel, an office tower, retail and a school.
A decade later, West Palm is threatening Greene with a $5 million fine if he doesn’t finish his premier mixed-use development soon. Earlier this month, the city commission certified an agreement with the developer that he will complete the two-tower, 30-story One West Palm by the end of 2027. Otherwise, he’ll have to fork over the hefty late fee.
Greene said he plans to complete One West Palm before the deadline.
It’s a squeeze play for a city widely seen as a partner to the real estate industry and the titans who want to build in it. And it’s in sharp contrast to Ross’ gargantuan efforts, which have produced millions of square feet of office and apartment developments in the same amount of time.
But to Greene, his delays at One West Palm distract from his myriad of projects throughout West Palm and Palm Beach County.
“We’re building stuff all the time,” he said. “Everyone focuses on the one building that seems to be taking a very long time.”
Red light, Greene light
Greene’s vision for his West Palm Beach projects came together at a time of great personal change.
In 2009, Greene bought a 3.6-acre oceanfront Palm Beach estate for $24 million. Comparable properties today trade for more than $100 million, but that was long before the pandemic altered market dynamics on the island. He had married his wife Mei Sze Chan a few years earlier, and the couple had just welcomed their first child. In 2010, he launched an unsuccessful bid for U.S. Senate.
But his political ambitions were dogged by his past.
He is among the mythologized figures who had the prescience to bet against the housing market in the mid-aughts, a move that earned him an $800 million windfall when Wall Street came crashing down in 2008. A profile in Forbes that year titled “The Reluctant Billionaire” elevated his reputation nationally, along with tales of his bachelor days in Beverly Hills. For years, most articles about Greene mentioned that his best man was Mike Tyson, that he partied with Paris Hilton and Lindsey Lohan, and that he hosted infamous Hollywood madam Heidi Fleiss in his guest house for a year, describing her as a “nice girl.”
It didn’t play well with voters, and he lost to his rival in the Democratic primary that year.
But Greene had other irons in the fire. He was quietly amassing a sprawling portfolio in Palm Beach County, banking property as South Florida crawled out of its post-financial crisis pit.
He bought an incomplete 548-unit apartment complex in West Palm Beach for $6.8 million in 2011 and finished construction of the complex in 2015. He bought the former Palm Beach Post Office for $3.7 million –– which he sold later to the Breakers for $28 million. He bought the oceanfront Palm Beach resort now known as Tideline for $42 million.
He also snapped up hundreds of condos in newly completed buildings like the Whitney at 410 Evernia Street, City Palms at 480 Hibiscus Street and the Strand at 255 Evernia Street. In 2015, he paid $24 million for a 3.3-acre parcel at 419 Lakeview Avenue, still a vacant lot with seasonal pumpkin and Christmas tree markets.
Greene estimates his property holdings in the county are worth billions.
“I did buy an enormous amount of land,” he said, adding he’s been intentionally restrained in pacing his developments. “If I built it all at once, it would flood the market.”
The sites that have made headlines recently are a 26-acre spread he acquired between 2012 and 2016 in West Palm’s Currie Park Mixed Use District. It was during this time Greene paid $10 million for the 3.3-acre One West Palm development site at 550 North Quadrille Boulevard.
Designed by Arquitectonica, One West Palm is set to include 200,000 square feet of office space, 326 apartments, 201 hotel rooms and amenities like a fitness club, spa, movie theater, pools and indoor tennis courts.
Construction started in 2019, with the expectation it would be finished in 2022.
But Greene found himself bogged down in conflict from early days. He clashed with both the contractor and the city, and ultimately fired Kast Construction from the project in 2024.
While other developers have investors and lenders breathing down their necks when construction runs behind, the self-financing billionaire didn’t “have anyone to answer to,” he said.
While One West Palm faced delays, Greene was at work on another major two-tower development nearby. He announced plans for the Herzog & de Meuron-designed project at 2175 and 2251 North Flagler Drive in 2023, touting the Swiss architecture firm as a major get for a maturing city. The 76-unit project is predicated on a 2021 upzoning of the Currie Park Mixed Use District.
It was the upzoning, which allowed Greene to build well beyond previously allowed height limits, that was targeted by the city this fall while he was attempting to get final approvals for the condos. A letter from Mayor Keith James stating the city would retract the height allowances prompted Greene to sue the city in October, alleging West Palm was improperly dragging out the approval process.
“If this mayor wants me to just be a land banker and not build anything, I won’t build anything,” he said at the time.
Greene cut a deal with the city, agreeing to the potential $5 million One West Palm penalty, while securing the height for his Herzog & de Meuron condos. He also committed to a land swap and a $6 million payment to the city for the connection of Northwood Road and Currie Park.
A decade in the making, Greene’s vision for his West Palm portfolio hasn’t totally materialized. He completed the 198-unit Brandon Estates apartment complex in 2024, and he’s finished industrial projects farther inland. He also opened the Greene School in 2016, and it now runs from pre-K to 12th grade with an admissions waitlist.
He still needs to get the condos through final approval and One West Palm its certificate of occupancy. He’s also working on Live Local projects in the city’s downtown, a land donation to the proposed Vanderbilt University graduate campus, and plans for an 8.4-acre waterfront site on Flagler Drive. To him, timing is everything. And with so many other developers building around his sites, the timing seems better than ever.
“There’s a lot of luck in real estate development. I’m not stupid, I know you can be an idiot and make money in a great cycle, and you can be a genius and lose money in a bad cycle,” he said. “We delayed [One West Palm] to get the perfect project, and just by luck, everything around it has blossomed.”
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