The development of Boca Raton (postwar)
Between 1950 and 1960, the small farm and resort community of Boca Raton grew from roughly 1,000 residents to nearly 7,000 — a sevenfold increase that signaled the beginning of among the most dramatic municipal transformations in Palm Beach County history.[1] The postwar decades remade Boca Raton from a quiet agricultural outpost into an expanding suburban city, driven by returning veterans, new residential developments, and a regional population surge that reshaped South Florida as a whole. By 1970, the city's population had reached approximately 28,500, reflecting growth that compressed into a single decade what many communities take a generation to achieve.[2] This article examines the forces, patterns, and consequences of that postwar expansion in Boca Raton, situating the city's growth within the broader context of mid-twentieth-century Florida development.
Historical Background
Long before the postwar boom reshaped Boca Raton's landscape, the area carried a deep and layered past. The Tequesta tribe were among Southeast Florida's first inhabitants, having dwelt in the region from approximately 500 BCE through the period of Spanish colonization.[3] Centuries later, the area passed through Spanish and then American territorial governance before emerging as a recognizable community in the modern sense.
The early twentieth century brought the first significant wave of speculative development. The Florida land boom of the early 1920s introduced a frenzy of real estate activity and dramatic changes to what had been a largely bucolic Boca Raton.[4] Promoters and developers descended on the region with ambitious plans, platting subdivisions and constructing infrastructure in anticipation of a mass migration of buyers. The collapse of that boom in the mid-1920s, followed by the Great Depression and then World War II, effectively paused large-scale development for the better part of two decades. By 1950, Boca Raton remained a modest town of approximately 1,000 people — small enough that its farms, citrus groves, and resort establishments still defined its character as much as any formal urban infrastructure.
The Postwar Population Surge
The decade following World War II fundamentally altered Boca Raton's demographic trajectory. Veterans returning from overseas, coupled with broad national trends toward suburban living and the widespread availability of federally backed mortgages, created favorable conditions for growth across Florida. Boca Raton, situated along the southeastern coast between Fort Lauderdale and West Palm Beach, stood in the path of that expansion.
By 1960, the town's population had reached close to 7,000 residents, reflecting the cumulative effect of residential construction, infrastructure investment, and in-migration from northern states.[5] The pattern was consistent with broader demographic shifts occurring throughout Palm Beach County, where agricultural lands were steadily giving way to residential subdivisions and commercial corridors. New housing tracts replaced orange groves and truck farms. Paved roads extended into previously undeveloped areas. Schools, churches, and civic institutions multiplied to serve an expanding and largely young population.
The following decade accelerated that trajectory. Between 1960 and 1970, Boca Raton's population grew from approximately 7,000 to around 28,500 — a fourfold increase within a single ten-year span.[6] This rate of growth placed Boca Raton among the faster-expanding municipalities in Florida during that period and reflected the intensifying regional appetite for suburban residential development. Air conditioning, increasingly affordable by the late 1950s and early 1960s, made year-round living in South Florida more attractive to newcomers who might otherwise have found the summer heat prohibitive. Interstate highway construction improved connectivity, and Florida Atlantic University, which opened in Boca Raton in 1964, brought an institutional anchor that further stimulated growth in the surrounding area.
Land Use and Urban Form
The physical transformation of Boca Raton during the postwar decades was visible in its changing land use patterns. The agricultural character that had defined the town through the mid-twentieth century gave way incrementally to residential subdivisions, shopping centers, and light commercial development. The former farm town's grid of citrus groves and fields was systematically converted into plats of single-family homes, duplexes, and eventually larger planned communities.
The resort dimension of Boca Raton's prewar identity — centered on the historic Boca Raton Resort and Club, itself a remnant of the 1920s boom era — coexisted uneasily with the suburban residential expansion. The luxury hospitality economy that the resort represented occupied a distinct niche from the mass-market residential development that was driving population growth. As the city grew, the resort remained an important feature of Boca Raton's identity and economy, but it no longer defined the town to the degree it once had.
Zoning and planning policies during the postwar period were largely reactive rather than anticipatory, as was common in many rapidly growing Florida municipalities. Land was rezoned and developed in response to market demand rather than according to a comprehensive long-range vision. This approach resulted in uneven development patterns: some areas were built out densely and quickly, while others remained undeveloped pockets even as surrounding land filled in. The lack of early coordinated planning would later generate debates about growth management, infrastructure capacity, and community character that persisted into subsequent decades.
Economic Dimensions of Growth
The population surge of the 1950s and 1960s was both a product of and a stimulus to economic development in Boca Raton. New residents required services — groceries, medical care, retail, banking, and education — and businesses followed the population northward from Fort Lauderdale and southward from Palm Beach. Commercial strips developed along Federal Highway and other arterials, reflecting the automobile-oriented development pattern that dominated postwar American suburban growth.
The arrival of IBM in Boca Raton — which would come to define the city's economic identity in subsequent decades — occurred at the tail end of the postwar growth era being examined here, but the groundwork was laid by the infrastructure, workforce, and institutional base that postwar growth had established. The presence of Florida Atlantic University created a local population of educated workers and residents whose skills were relevant to the technology and professional services sectors that would later become central to Boca Raton's economy.
Agriculture, which had been central to Boca Raton's economic life through the mid-twentieth century, declined steadily as a share of the local economy during the postwar decades. Farmland commanded higher prices as residential lots than as working agricultural land, and many longtime farming families sold their holdings to developers. The products that had once defined the area's commercial identity — celery, sugarcane, and citrus — gave way to housing developments whose names sometimes evoked the agricultural landscape they replaced.
Civic and Cultural Development
The rapid population growth of the postwar decades created civic challenges alongside economic opportunities. A community that had numbered 1,000 people in 1950 required dramatically different institutional capacity by 1970 when it approached 28,500 residents.[7] Schools were built and then overcrowded within years of opening. Municipal services — water, sewage, roads, fire and police protection — required continuous expansion to keep pace with demand.
Community organizations, churches, civic associations, and cultural institutions emerged to serve a population that was largely composed of newcomers without deep local roots. The process of building a shared community identity was complicated by the speed of growth and the geographic dispersal of residents across a rapidly expanding urban footprint. Longtime residents who had known Boca Raton as a small, close-knit farm town found themselves living in a fundamentally different kind of place within a relatively short time.
The Boca Raton Historical Society, which documents the city's development across this and other periods, has preserved accounts and records that trace how residents navigated and understood this transformation.[8] The tension between growth and preservation — of historic structures, of community scale, of agricultural heritage — became a recurring theme in Boca Raton's civic life as the postwar era progressed.
Legacy and Longer-Term Significance
The postwar development of Boca Raton established the demographic scale and urban structure upon which all subsequent growth was layered. The city that emerged from the 1950s and 1960s was unambiguously a suburban municipality rather than a farm town or resort village, and that fundamental character has persisted and deepened in the decades since. The infrastructure built during those growth years — roads, schools, water systems, commercial corridors — shaped the city's physical form in ways that remained legible well into the twenty-first century.
The experience of Boca Raton during this period also reflects broader patterns in Florida and national suburban development. The rapid transition from a small agricultural and resort community to a city of nearly 30,000 within two decades was not unique to Boca Raton; similar trajectories played out across South Florida and across the Sun Belt more generally. What distinguishes Boca Raton's case is the combination of its resort heritage, the early real estate history rooted in the 1920s land boom, and the institutional anchors — particularly Florida Atlantic University — that gave the postwar growth distinctive characteristics.[9]
The Tequesta heritage, the Spanish colonial period, the nineteenth-century settlement, the 1920s boom and bust, and the postwar suburban transformation represent successive layers in a history that the Riviera Civic Association and other local organizations have worked to document and make accessible to residents and researchers.[10] Understanding the postwar development era in particular is essential to understanding the Boca Raton of today: its geographic extent, its demographic composition, its economic orientation, and its ongoing debates about growth, identity, and planning all trace in significant measure to the decisions and forces of the 1950s and 1960s.