The Two Towers Rising on Federal Highway Aren't Building the Same Boynton Beach

Drive south on Federal Highway past downtown this month and two things happen in about a mile. First you pass a suddenly empty parking lot where a Golden Corral fed Sunday buffet crowds for more than twenty years before its final dinner service on July 26. Then you hit a stretch where two eight-story buildings are climbing out of the ground within blocks of each other, on the same road, at the same time. From the sidewalk they look like the same story: Boynton Beach is finally building up. But the numbers on their ground floors say something different, and neither one is actually where the city is betting its restaurant future.

Two Buildings, Same Street, Different Math

The first tower is The Dune, rising on South Federal Highway near the marina and Ocean Avenue after being discussed since 2018. It will hold 298 apartments in the main eight-story building plus 38 three-story townhomes, for 336 homes total, with about 2,600 square feet of commercial space. Nearly 60 percent of those homes, 198 of the 336, are reserved as workforce housing for middle-income residents.

The second is Ocean One, stretching from 114 to 222 N. Federal Highway between Boynton Beach Boulevard and East Ocean Avenue. It's also eight stories, with 371 rental apartments, a 90-space public parking garage, a pool, a fitness center, a pickleball court, coworking space, and a sports simulator. It also carries roughly 25,000 square feet of restaurants, shops, and other commercial space.

Put those two commercial numbers next to the unit counts and the buildings stop looking like siblings.

Roughly 8 square feet of retail per home is barely a mail room. Roughly 67 square feet per home, nearly nine times as much, is enough to actually anchor a storefront. One building is being built primarily as housing. The other is being built as a retail base with apartments stacked on top of it.

The Workforce Housing Number Doing the Quiet Work

The Dune's 59 percent workforce housing share matters more than its silhouette does. This isn't a luxury conversion of an old commercial strip. It's a deliberate bet that downtown's next wave of residents will be middle-income households, not primarily second-home buyers or high-end renters. That distinction shapes what kind of foot traffic actually shows up on Ocean Avenue once the building fills, and it's a different demographic story than what's typically assumed when a city announces "hundreds of new units" near its waterfront.

The Restaurant Row Is Being Built a Block Away, Not in Either Tower

If neither Federal Highway tower is the city's real restaurant play, where is it? According to reporting from The Coastal Star, the Community Redevelopment Agency's actual vision runs through Ocean Avenue itself, and through buildings that predate either tower by a century.

CRA executive director Christopher Brown laid out the strategy at a February 2026 commission meeting, seeking $30 million to fund it. His own framing was blunt: "We have a big appetite, and we have a big job to do." The model he named directly is Delray Beach's Atlantic Avenue.

The plan leans on adaptive reuse rather than new construction. The CRA wants to restore the 1919 Oscar Magnuson House into a food hall. Two other historic buildings already anchor the cultural end of the avenue: the 1927 high school, now the Boynton Beach Arts & Cultural Center, and the 1913 elementary school, now the Schoolhouse Children's Museum. A third project, the Villages at East Ocean Avenue, is an eight-story mixed-use building on the north side of the avenue targeted for completion in 2027, with a second phase that restores the 1907 Andrews House into a cafe.

So the actual restaurant corridor Boynton Beach is trying to build isn't inside either Federal Highway tower's small or large commercial footprint. It's being assembled out of century-old houses one street over, on a different timeline entirely.

What Just Disappeared Down Winchester Park Boulevard

The Golden Corral closure is a smaller story, but it's not unrelated. The restaurant sat on 2.67 acres at 389 Winchester Park Boulevard near Walmart, a roughly 10,000-square-foot building that had already been quietly listed for sale in late 2025 for $4.85 million, months before the closure was announced. No redevelopment plan has been made public yet.

There's a piece of local trivia buried in that address. Winchester Park Boulevard is named for Oscar Winchester, who ran a Boynton pineapple plantation called Flatwoods in the early 1900s and earned the nickname "Pineapple King" for it. A single-use buffet restaurant closing on a road named for the city's pineapple era is its own quiet marker of how many times this stretch of Boynton Beach has already changed uses.

It's also a different kind of change than what's happening on Federal Highway. The Winchester Park closure is an aging retail pad west of the corridor, near a big-box anchor, with no announced future. The Dune and Ocean One are institutional multifamily projects tied directly to the CRA's downtown and waterfront strategy. Both are reshaping the city. Neither is reshaping it the same way.

Where the Money Already Landed

While the towers rise and the historic restorations wait on funding, the restaurant scene residents actually use hasn't paused. It's just spread across three separate pockets of the city rather than concentrated on Ocean Avenue yet.

• At the Boynton Harbor Marina, the only publicly owned marina in south Palm Beach County, Two Georges Waterfront Grille, Marina Cafe, and Banana Boat serve the waterfront crowd. Banana Boat has run its dockside patio on the Intracoastal since 1978.
• Downtown proper holds Driftwood, a chef-driven cocktail and small-plates room, along with Sweetwater, Florida's first whiskey bar, and The Bungalow Bar & Grill, which runs live music Thursday through Saturday and a weekend brunch with bottomless mimosas.
• The N. Congress Avenue corridor carries its own identity, with Agliolio Italian Bistro & Bar and NOBO Brewing Company, an award-winning brewery off High Ridge Road.

That's the map today. The CRA's stated goal is to eventually stitch those three pockets together along Ocean Avenue, using the Magnuson House and the Andrews House as connective tissue rather than building the restaurant scene from scratch inside a new tower's ground floor.

The Skyline Is Changing Faster Than the Street Is

The two buildings rising on Federal Highway right now are real, and they're going to add hundreds of neighbors to downtown Boynton Beach within the next year or two. But the commercial square footage inside them tells you they were never meant to carry the same weight. One is workforce housing with a small lobby-adjacent retail bay. The other is a genuine mixed-use anchor. And the restaurant row the CRA has actually described, the one modeled on Atlantic Avenue, is still mostly funding requests and century-old houses waiting on restoration budgets.

If you've been watching the cranes and wondering when Ocean Avenue starts feeling like a destination rather than a road you drive past, the honest answer is that it depends more on the Magnuson House and the Andrews House than on either tower currently under construction.

We track these changes as they happen on our Boynton Beach neighborhood page, because knowing what's actually being built, and what isn't, is part of understanding a city you already call home. If you ever want to talk through what any of this means for your own corner of Boynton Beach, Jon Lewis is happy to help. Let's Connect.