By Bill DiPaolo – Palm Beach Post Staff Writer
Posted: 12:36 p.m. Saturday, Sept. 6, 2014
JUPITER —
New restaurants. A luxury movie theater. A gated community with 275 residences, retail and biotech. A bigger gas station. A new medical office building. A $150 million entertainment center. More retail All these are being built and proposed on Indiantown Road, the town’s main east-west roadway. The road starts at the Maltz Jupiter Theatre on State Road A1A and goes west about a dozen miles past Florida’s Turnpike to the Beeline Highway. In between are local places like Average Joe’s Pub to auto dealerships to giant retailers such as Wal-Mart.
But Rebel Cook, a north county commercial property Realtor who is the agent for a 2-acre vacant parcel on Indiantown Road near Town Hall, said Indiantown Road is a future economic engine for Jupiter. “If I had five properties on Indiantown Road, I could sell them right now,” Cook said. The fact that there is little undeveloped land on the town’s main road to and from the beach makes the property valuable, Cook said. As that inventory shrinks, the properties with older buildings will be redeveloped, said Cook, whose office is off Indiantown Road near Wal-Mart. “The traffic is not that bad. The complainers are old-timers who don’t want growth or development. But they have to understand that development brings revenue to businesses and tax dollars to local government,” Cook said.
