What North Palm Beach Is Actually Fighting About at the Old Twin City Mall Site

"It's already getting so crowded, sometimes I have to wait two lights to get through the light," a North Palm Beach resident told a local TV reporter standing near the corner of U.S. Highway 1 and Northlake Boulevard. She was talking about traffic that hasn't even arrived yet. The 13.15-acre lot behind her, the one that used to hold Twin City Mall, is still fenced. It has been fenced, in one form or another, since before most of the village's current council members were elected.

If you live in North Palm Beach, you already know the shorthand: Village Place. You've seen the yard signs, sat through a council meeting or two, maybe voted in the special election earlier this year that hinged almost entirely on this one property. What most residents have not seen laid out plainly is that the fight everyone's been having in public, about height and traffic and whether the corner should look like Fort Lauderdale, is a different fight from the one actually being decided in court.

What's Sitting on That Corner Right Now

Twin City Mall opened in 1971 with more than 30 stores, a Sears, and a movie theater with what was then a novelty: automated projection. It sat on the border between North Palm Beach and Lake Park. By the late 1980s, major tenants had started closing, and after the Gardens Mall opened nearby, the center went into a slow decline that outlasted several redevelopment attempts dating back to the 1990s. Portions of the original site were eventually rebuilt into the Northlake Promenade Shoppes on the Lake Park side and the Village Shoppes on the North Palm Beach side, but the 13-acre core parcel at the intersection sat mostly idle for decades.

That's the site now called Village Place, and it's the reason U.S. 1 traffic through that stretch has become the village's most talked-about inconvenience even before a single new unit has opened.

What the Council Actually Approved

The current plan comes from developer Devland Holdings, working with Cypress Estate Advisors and local developer Nader Salour, whose past Palm Beach County projects include Abacoa and BallenIsles Country Club. Architecture firms Gensler and 2GHO are handling design, and the master plan divides the site into four parcels under a floor area ratio of 2.75, with the tallest buildings, up to 14 stories, placed in the interior of the property to take advantage of water views rather than fronting U.S. 1 directly. The plan sets aside roughly 1.08 acres of civic and open space, more than the village's minimum requirement, and the total build-out is capped at 1.58 million square feet across a phased plan the developer's own project site describes as unfolding over roughly a decade.

The unit count has shifted depending on when you look. Filings tracked by development news outlet BLDUP in 2023 described the project at 947 multifamily units, 206 senior living residences, 222 hotel rooms, and 131,000 square feet of retail. Local nonprofit newsroom Stet News, reporting in the spring of 2026, described the same project in rounder terms: roughly 1,300 units including the hotel and assisted-living components, plus the same 131,000 square feet of retail. The North Palm Beach Village Council approved the master plan and street layout unanimously, 5 to 0, on April 10, 2025. Building height, design, and final density were left for a later vote.

The Lawsuit Isn't About the Skyline

Here's the part that gets lost in most conversations about this project: the legal fight that's actually holding things up has nothing to do with the 14 stories or the traffic count that dominates public comment.

In May 2025, Devland Holdings sued the Village of North Palm Beach, arguing that the council had tacked on 37 additional conditions to its approval that restrict the developer's plan. Of those 37 conditions, the ones specifically named in reporting on the lawsuit are the number of EV charging stations and the number of golf cart parking spaces required on site. Not height. Not unit count. Not the water-view towers that generated most of the public testimony. A federal court docket for the case, NP-Devland Holdings, LLC v. Village of North Palm Beach, Florida, was still listed as open as of its most recent update in March 2026.

That's worth sitting with. Two years of hearings, an election, and a lawsuit have circled around whether this corner should feel like the rest of North Palm Beach or something denser. But the piece of paper actually in front of a judge is about parking counts for golf carts and charging equipment. The visible argument and the legal argument are not the same argument, and the second one is the one that could delay or reshape the project regardless of how residents feel about the skyline.

A Timeline Decided by a Handful of Votes

The March 2026 special election became, by most local accounts, a referendum on Village Place. All three candidates for the open council seat built their campaigns around it. Norris, a longtime council member who resigned in 2023 rather than comply with a new state financial disclosure law, argued the intersection was the right place for height and that it wouldn't damage the village's character. Zellner described herself as the middle option between Norris's support and Okolichany's calls to slow the project down. None of them won outright in the first round.

The runoff turned on 39 votes out of 2,615 cast. That's out of a village with roughly 13,000 residents and 9,275 registered voters, according to the village clerk. Compare that to a typical council race: the 2024 election drew 2,279 ballots, and 2022 averaged about 3,000 votes across three seats. The Village Place runoff pulled a turnout that was elevated but not dramatically so, for an issue that had been framed for months as the defining question facing the village. A project that could add up to 14 stories and roughly 1,300 residential and hotel units to a 13-acre parcel was, in the end, decided by a margin smaller than the crowd at a high school football game.

Zellner would become the first council member in about two decades to live west of Prosperity Farms Road, a detail she raised herself while campaigning as a sign that the council's geography hadn't kept pace with where residents actually live.

What Hasn't Changed

None of this has moved dirt. The developer's own project materials describe a phased, multi-year build-out, but no groundbreaking date has been reported, and the fenced lot at U.S. 1 and Northlake looks the same today as it did when construction was first projected to start no earlier than 2025. The lawsuit over parking and charging conditions remains the thing standing between an approved master plan and an actual construction crew. The council seat that campaigned hardest on this issue changed hands by 39 votes. Whatever happens next at that corner will be decided in a courtroom over conditions most residents have never heard discussed, not at another council meeting about how many stories is too many.

If you're watching that corner because you're curious about where North Palm Beach is headed, or because you're weighing what a project like this means for a home you already own or one you're considering nearby, The Jessica Gulick Group tracks these kinds of local shifts as part of daily work in Palm Beach County. Reach out to request a private consultation if you'd like a grounded read on how developments like Village Place tend to play out on the ground.