On the evening of June 18, a Black church in Riviera Beach filled with people who don't normally show up to zoning meetings. They came to confront a developer from New York about a tower planned for the foot of the Blue Heron Boulevard Bridge, and for two hours they asked about shadows, traffic, stormwater, and a reef most of them had snorkeled since they were kids. One longtime diver put it plainly: crossing that bridge and seeing open water instead of a building is, in his words, worth more than anyone's tax revenue.
What almost nobody in that room wanted to say out loud is that winning this fight might not get them what they actually want. Stopping the tower as proposed could open the door to something taller, built with no public hearing at all. That contradiction is the real story here, and it's more interesting than the tower itself.
What Continuum Actually Wants to Build
The project is called Singer Island Gateway. The Continuum Company, a New York developer, has assembled six of seven parcels along Lake Drive at the eastern base of the Blue Heron Boulevard Bridge, just over three acres in total, with the last piece expected to close soon. Miami-based Arquitectonica designed it.
The basic shape of the proposal, as it has moved through Riviera Beach's review process since site plans were filed earlier this year:
- A residential tower rising 25 stories, roughly 350 feet, though the developer's own materials note it leans closer to 29 stories once mechanical floors are counted
- Somewhere between 298 and 304 condominiums and townhouses, a number that has shifted as the plans evolved
- Restaurant and retail space, a marina, and about 25,000 square feet of public open space fronting Blue Heron Boulevard
- A workforce housing component tied to church-owned land nearby
None of it is built yet. The city's Planning and Zoning Board, its Community Redevelopment Agency, and its City Council all still have to sign off, and as of the first week of September the project's own public tracker still lists it as "announced" with no completion date attached. A board hearing planned for April was canceled and pushed to May. This has been slow by design, not by accident, because everyone involved knows the site sits next to something the city can't easily replace.
The Reef Underneath the Argument
That something is the snorkel trail at Phil Foster Park, tucked under the bridge on the north side of Blue Heron Boulevard. It's an 800-foot artificial reef built from more than 600 tons of Anastasia rock boulders, sitting in six to twenty feet of water, close enough to shore that a family can walk in from the beach. Reef-ID authors Paul Humann and Ned Deloach have called the site Florida's exotic critter capital, and Sport Diver Magazine once ranked it among the fifty best dives in the world. Divers who spoke to local reporters this summer described stingrays, rainbow-colored fish, and coral in colors they'd never seen anywhere else.
That's the ecosystem sitting a few hundred feet from a proposed 300-foot tower. Residents at the June meeting pressed Arquitectonica's Sherri Gutierrez on the shadow the building would cast across the Intracoastal, and the firm's answer was that the tallest sections are positioned on the southeast corner specifically to minimize that shadow, with the building shaped to read as three separate towers rather than one solid mass. Whether that satisfies anyone who dives there regularly is a different question, and it was the one that dominated the room.
Two Numbers the City Keeps Repeating
Riviera Beach officials have their own case for the project, and it comes down to money that would stay local. A Continuum representative told the June meeting the city stands to collect four to five million dollars a year in property taxes if the Gateway gets built, all of it reinvested inside the Community Redevelopment Agency's boundary because of where the site sits. For scale, nearby Lake Park just learned its own twin-tower Nautilus 220 project, at 24 stories, was valued at $400 million and could generate about $2 million a year in taxes starting next year. A single building nearly matching that valuation, sitting on a barrier island where every parcel is contested, changes what the city's redevelopment budget can fund.
There's also a workforce housing piece attached to nearby church land. Continuum's representative said rent from that component, after operating costs, would be donated to a consortium of Riviera Beach churches and nonprofits, an amount he estimated at $300,000 to $400,000 a year, which he framed as more than a million dollars funneled to local clergy and nonprofits within three years.
Commissioner Anastasia Karloutsos of Palm Beach Shores, whose town sits directly south of the site, didn't dispute the numbers so much as the premise. She said she wants the development to happen, just not at this scale, and asked the city to run the math on whether a shorter building could still pencil out.
The Live Local Catch
Here's the part of the argument that got quieter as the night went on. Florida's Live Local Act lets a developer skip the entire public review process, no Planning Board, no City Council vote, if at least 40 percent of a project's units are set aside as affordable rentals. Under the law, that kind of project can rise as tall as any building already standing within a mile of the site. Riviera Beach's own guidance on the Live Local Act spells out that qualifying projects are approved administratively, with no further action from the city council required.
That one-mile rule matters enormously on Singer Island. A Continuum representative told the June meeting that 35 residential buildings on the island already reach 25 stories or taller, which would make that height available by right to a Live Local project with zero public hearings. Local reporting from Stet News found a smaller but still substantial number when it counted buildings along North Ocean Drive that Saturday, several of them under 25 stories, which suggests the true comparator building matters as much as the headline count. Either way, the mechanism is real: if Continuum walks away from Singer Island Gateway as currently designed, nothing stops the same parcel from becoming a Live Local project that residents never get to weigh in on at a public meeting.
The state just made that leverage stronger. House Bill 1389, effective July 1, 2026, added protection against cities using setbacks or other dimensional tricks to quietly cap height on qualifying projects, closing off one of the few workarounds local governments had left. So the threat residents heard about in June isn't hypothetical or fading. It got more durable a few weeks after that church meeting ended.
This is the fork nobody at the meeting wanted to sit with. Push hard enough to shrink or kill Singer Island Gateway, and the property owner has a legal path to something taller, built faster, with none of the shadow studies, none of the public comment periods, and none of the two-hour meetings that gave residents a say this time. Let the current proposal move forward with modifications, and the city gets a building with negotiated setbacks, a genuine open space commitment, and a workforce housing side deal, even if it's still much taller than most people crossing that bridge would prefer.
Nobody at the church knew which path the city would end up on, and nobody reading this in early September does either. The project is still working through the same three approval bodies it needed back in March. What's changed is that the stakes on both sides of the fork are now visible to everyone who lives here, which is more than most zoning fights ever manage to make clear.
If you're watching how this plays out, or you're curious what a project like this could mean for values on your stretch of the island, Joel Poulin tracks these stories as they develop and is always happy to talk through what's actually happening on the ground. Schedule a complimentary listing consultation and market snapshot anytime you want a straight read on Singer Island.
