What's Actually Moving On Old Burnt Store Road This Summer
Drive north on Old Burnt Store Road right now and the shoulder still reads the way it always has. A row of Australian pine at the fence line, chain link around the northernmost island, and a two-lane stretch above Van Buren Parkway that feels the same as it did a decade ago. If you live off Chiquita, Kismet, Diplomat, or one of the streets tucked between Tropicana Park and the Spreader, you have been asked some version of the same question at every neighbor gathering since January. When does anything actually happen?
The short answer is that a lot has already happened. None of it looks like construction yet, and most of it is not going to look like construction this year either. What is changing this summer is smaller and more useful to a homeowner than a rendering of a ten-story hotel. Two projects on the corridor have moved from paper into contracts, and both of them are going to shape the drive and the noise between now and the end of the calendar year.
On January 21, Cape Coral City Council voted unanimously 7-0 in approval of the Seven Islands development project, a $1 billion multi-use project that will feature condominiums, apartments, hotel, marina, resort lagoon, restaurants, retail and an entire island for public use including a community center, splash pad, kayak launch, outdoor spaces and a hip food truck park. Three weeks later the deal closed. The 47-acre property at 606 Old Burnt Store Road North and 106/200 Old Burnt Store Road North closed on Feb. 11, paving the way to permitting.
Forest Development, the North Palm Beach group buying the land, has been clear about the sequence. The developer hopes to commence the civil construction phase this fall. "Within nine months we will submit for the civil engineering permit," said Sam Bauer, Forest Development senior vice president of development. Read that carefully. Civil construction and vertical construction are not the same thing. Site work, seawall repair, road tie-ins, and utility stubs come first. The condos and the Marriott come much later.
How much later depends on the Army Corps of Engineers. Permitting is expected to extend into 2027; in fact, some reports indicate final permits may not be in hand until 2028. If you are picturing cranes on the skyline by next winter, adjust the picture. If you are picturing dust and truck traffic on Old Burnt Store Road by late fall, that is closer to reality.
There is one clause in the development agreement worth memorizing if you live nearby. No residential units can be occupied until those community amenities, from the waterfront dining to road median upgrades, are completed. That is unusual for a project of this scale, and it flips the normal order of operations. Developers typically push vertical revenue-generating buildings first and stall on the parks. Here the leverage runs the other way.
Peter Baytarian, Forest Development's founder, has said the phasing publicly. "One of the first things we are going to do is the community center island, so our residents have a place to gather and amenities to enjoy," Baytarian noted. The community island in question is Island 7, the one closest to the existing neighborhood. Community Island 7, positioned next to Tropicana Park, creates an expansion of the "greenspace" by combining the activity use and open spaces of each location.
What actually lands on Island 7 in the first phase, per the plans discussed at the January hearing:
Kevin Black, current president of the Northwest Cape Coral Neighborhood Association, was at the Cape Coral City Council meeting on Jan. 21, where the development agreement between the city and Gulf Gateway Resort and Marina was passed unanimously. "I believe Gulf Gateway and Marina will be a hub in the northwest," Black said. That is the practical read. For a household already living on Chiquita or NW 20th, the first thing that appears is not a tower. It is a walkable park with dinner options, adjacent to a park you already use.
The bigger story on the pavement itself is a separate contract. In May, the Lee County Commission awarded a $3 million task order to Ajax Paving Industries of Florida for safety work on the stretch above Van Buren where the road narrows. The $3 million agreement is a new task work order to an existing contract with Ajax Paving Industries of Florda LLC, which was the lowest competitive bid. Work is expected to begin in June and be complete in about nine months. The project will install safety measures along the remaining two-lane section of Burnt Store Road without impacting the eventual four-lane widening project for that segment.
The scope covers the two-lane bottleneck from Van Buren Parkway north to Vincent Avenue, including rumble stripes on the edge lines and along the center line to alert drivers if they cross out of the travel lanes. This is a patch, not the widening everyone actually wants. The full four-lane fix is a Tier One county priority still hunting for funding. The Florida Department of Transportation in August 2025 completed the Project Development & Environmental (PD&E) study of the northern segment.
Some context for what "the widening" means on this road. Lee County has been chipping away at it for years:
| Segment | Status |
|---|---|
| Van Buren Parkway to Diplomat Parkway | Completed January 2018 |
| Diplomat Parkway to south of Tropicana Parkway | Completed April 2020 |
| Tropicana Parkway to Pine Island Road | Completed early 2021 |
| Van Buren north to Vincent Avenue | Interim safety work, June 2026 start |
| Northern segment widening | PD&E complete, funding pending |
If you commute south toward Pine Island Road every morning, the Ajax work will affect your drive from June through roughly next spring. That is a concrete, near-term thing, unlike the ten-year buildout north of it.
Neither Seven Islands nor the Ajax patch is happening in a vacuum. The city has been running utility lines north for years, and one very large private land deal has already been penciled in behind them.
On the utility side, construction on North 1 West began in 2022-2023 and is expected to finish by 2026. Next up is North 3, covering areas west of Burnt Store Road up to around Kismet Parkway, with utilities construction slated for 2024-2025. By 2027, the plan is to have extended utilities all the way north along Burnt Store Road to the city's boundary, opening roughly 2,000 acres of previously unserved land for new development. If you are still on a septic and a well, the North 3 window is the one to track.
On the private side, this includes bringing infrastructure to a massive 1,745-acre tract east of Burnt Store Road known as Hudson Creek, which was recently acquired by a developer in the largest raw-land deal in Lee County history. That tract does not have an approved master plan yet. It does have pipes coming.
Two more numbers from the January vote worth writing down. The agreement also requires construction of seawalls, roads and other public amenities, along with a $2.5 million compensation package from the city. And the environmental clock on the water side of the site has been running for a while. The permitting process for the seawall with the Department of Environmental Protection and Army Corps of Engineers began in May 2023.
The reason this matters for someone already living here is simple. Every one of those requirements is a lever the city can pull if the developer tries to invert the sequence and put condos in the ground before the park is finished. The paperwork is written to make sure Island 7 opens first.
Here is the thesis, and it is not the one the renderings suggest. The vote in January did not start construction. It started a slow, structured sequence in which the amenities you can actually walk to arrive well before the towers. The two visible changes on Old Burnt Store Road between now and the end of the year are a nine-month county safety contract on the two-lane stretch above Van Buren, and a civil-engineering permit application that Forest Development is trying to file by fall.
For a household in Northwest Cape, that means the summer of 2026 is a planning window, not a disruption window. The corridor's long-term value is being repriced in real time by permit filings, seawall applications, and a $2.5 million public-benefits package that has to close before anyone moves into a Seven Islands unit. The value shows up in surveys, wells, and neighboring lot lines before it shows up on Zillow.
If you own on one of the streets tucked between Tropicana Park and the Spreader and you are trying to figure out whether this is the moment to talk about repositioning your property, or whether the smart move is to sit tight through the permitting cycle, that conversation is worth having with someone who has been watching the corridor since before the 2016 vision plan. The team at McMurray & Members works this stretch of Cape Coral every week and can walk you through what the fall filings are likely to mean for your specific block. Let's Talk.
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