The Dream of Port Malabar

The Compound in Palm Bay: The area known informally as 'The Compound' sits in southwest Palm Bay, west of Interstate 95, south of the city's main developed core. It's a huge expanse — roughly 18,000 to 20,000 individual lots, mostly empty — covering thousands of acres of Florida scrub and flatwoods. Its story begins in the late 1950s and early 1960s, when developers bought the land and dreamed of building a massive planned city called Port Malabar (and a related development called Port Malabar Unit). The vision: The developers platted the land into a grid of small residential lots and laid out a network of streets on paper. The promotional vision was of a thriving suburban city — homes, schools, shopping centers, parks — built from scratch on what had been wild scrub and cattle land. Lots were marketed and sold, often to buyers out of state, sometimes sight unseen, on the promise of a city that would soon surround them. This kind of large-scale platting was common in mid-century Florida, where cheap land was subdivided and sold to investors and retirees. The Port Malabar dream was enormous in scale — if fully built, it would have been a major city. But the dream depended on a lot of things going right at once: roads, utilities, sewer, water, and thousands of buyers willing to build. As we'll see, those things didn't all come together, and the dream didn't turn out the way the brochures promised.