Ask a Park Shore neighbor what's changing in the community this year and most will mention the beach park. Fewer will bring up the tennis courts a few blocks north on Seagate Drive that don't belong to Park Shore at all. That gap is the story worth understanding, because the neighborhood is quietly running two defensive projects at once, and only one of them sits inside its own property lines.
The first is the kind of infrastructure work homeowners associations are supposed to do: engineering a taller, more resilient promenade in front of the Raymond L. Lutgert Beach Park, the 2.7-acre stretch of private beachfront that belongs exclusively to Park Shore Association members. The second is a fight the Association didn't start and doesn't control, over whether Naples Grande Beach Resort can trade seven tennis courts for a water park roughly a quarter mile past the Park Shore line. One is a construction project. The other is a boundary dispute the Association felt compelled to join even though the property in question isn't its own.
The Six-Foot Line the Association Is Trying to Erase
The promenade fronting the beach park currently sits at about six feet of elevation. The Association's stated goal, laid out in its own progress updates, is to more than double that height by building a substantial berm underneath it. Board representatives from Commons T/U, R and S have been meeting every two weeks with coastal engineers, land design architects, construction consultants and city stormwater planners to work out how to get there.
The reasoning isn't abstract. Properties that already sat behind higher berm sections came through Hurricanes Helene and Milton with less damage than sections still at the lower elevation, according to the Association's own account of the storms. That comparison, one stretch of coastline surviving intact while an adjacent stretch didn't, is the argument the berm project is built on.
Getting there still requires clearing the Florida Department of Environmental Protection and the City of Naples permitting department, and the Commons boards have to agree on financing before anything moves from concept to construction. The Association took its first concrete step in that direction by raising the initiation fee for new members to $1,000, while holding annual dues at $300, specifically to build reserves ahead of what it called the anticipated park resiliency project. Read plainly, current members aren't the ones covering the new engineering. New buyers into Park Shore condominiums are.
A Water Park That Isn't Even Inside Park Shore
A few blocks away, Naples Grande Beach Resort at 475 Seagate Drive has spent the better part of a year trying to convert seven Har-Tru tennis courts into what the resort's ownership calls an amenity and what nearly everyone else calls a water park. The plan, covering roughly 3.3 acres, includes a lazy river, two slides scaled to 22 feet, a children's pool with close to 20 water features, and a food service area built with a closed kitchen and a grease containment system meant to cut down on cooking odors reaching neighboring properties.
The ownership group behind the proposal is South Street Partners, a North Carolina firm, in partnership with the British real estate investor Henderson Park. Neither company owns anything in Park Shore. The project sits inside Pelican Bay's planned unit development, and the loudest opposition has come from the Pelican Bay subcommunities closest to those courts: Bay Villas, Tierra Mar and Bridge-Way Villas, along with neighboring Seagate and Naples Cay.
Park Shore Association noticed anyway. In a notice to members, the Association flagged the proposal as a development to watch even though it sits technically within a neighboring community, warning that a public-facing water attraction could increase vehicle traffic along bordering roads and add pressure to parking that Park Shore residents already share.
How the Fight Has Moved
The dispute hasn't sat still. It has swung between quiet and loud several times over the past year, and it still hasn't landed on a final answer.
| When | What happened |
|---|---|
| December 2025 | Neighbors in Seagate, Naples Cay and Pelican Bay's Bay Villas, Tierra Mar and Bridge-Way Villas organize opposition after learning the resort filed pre-application plans with Collier County. |
| January 2026 | Bay Villas' attorney files documents arguing the plan violates the Pelican Bay PUD and county land development code; the resort separately files a demolition plan for the existing courts. |
| March 2026 | Opponents bring their case to the Collier County Board of County Commissioners. Chairman Dan Kowal declines to open public comment, citing chamber rules. A "Stop The Waterpark" social campaign and GoFundMe follow. |
| May 2026 | County staff confirm the Site Development Plan Amendment has been withdrawn. Park Shore Association tells members the project is tabled for now. |
| July 2026 | The developers return with a revised design, moving the slides farther west so the nearest Bay Villas building sits 350 feet away, and scaling the slide height down to 22 feet to avoid a separate county structural review that kicks in above 25 feet. |
More than 1,300 people had signed a petition against the original plan by the time it reached the Board of County Commissioners in March, according to a WINK News report from that period. The July meeting, covered by Naples Press, drew roughly 150 attendees. Ken Silverman, president of the Pelican Bay Property Owners Association representing the community's 92 residential and mid- and high-rise neighborhoods, told the room the dispute would "most likely end up in the courts." As of the most recent public reporting, no county hearing date has been set and no final decision has been made.
Why Park Shore Keeps Talking About Someone Else's Tennis Courts
The instinct to treat this as a Pelican Bay problem misses how Park Shore is actually built. The Association, formed in 1971, is the largest voluntary property owners association in the City of Naples, covering five plats that stretch from the single-family streets and mid-rise condominiums of Units 1, 3 and 4 to the high-rises lining the west side of Gulf Shore Boulevard in Units 2 and 5. Altogether, more than 600 single-family homes and 3,590 condominium units across 25 high-rises and several mid-rises sit inside those boundaries.
None of that changes who owns the land at Naples Grande. What it does change is who drives the roads that would carry any new traffic the resort attracts. Seagate Drive and Crayton Road don't stop being useful to Park Shore residents because the water park would sit a few hundred feet outside the plat line. Beach parking, already tight enough that the Association issues its own notices heading into peak season, doesn't ask which HOA a car belongs to before filling a space. That's the actual argument buried in the Association's decision to weigh in on a project it has no legal standing to block. The boundary that matters here isn't the one surveyors draw. It's the one traffic and parking respect, and that one runs straight through both neighborhoods.
Two Defenses, Same Instinct
Put the berm and the water park fight side by side and the pattern is hard to miss. One is a slow, funded, permitted engineering project meant to keep storm surge from reaching the Gulf side of the neighborhood. The other is an unfunded, adversarial legal fight meant to keep traffic and commercial density from reaching the road side. Different tools, same underlying move: Park Shore is spending 2026 trying to control what crosses its edges, whether that edge faces the water or faces Seagate Drive.
None of it has paused the calendar that actually organizes daily life here. The Association held its annual meeting in February, where longtime advocate Jo Ann Smallwood was honored with a lifetime membership after more than four decades of work on Naples and Collier County conservation issues. Wine Wednesday returned to the beach park in March. The Easter egg hunt followed in April. Those dates didn't move because a permitting timeline in Tallahassee or a legal filing in Pelican Bay was still unresolved. That continuity is worth noticing on its own. The neighborhood residents actually live in day to day isn't the one being litigated or engineered. It's the one that still runs on schedule regardless.
Whichever way the Naples Grande fight eventually resolves, and whenever the berm finally clears its permitting hurdles, both projects say the same thing about how Park Shore sees itself right now: less as a fixed set of addresses and more as a shared exposure to whatever pressure shows up at its edges, from either direction.
If you're a Park Shore owner curious how either of these projects, the berm's cost-sharing structure or the water park's traffic questions, might factor into your own property's value or timing, The Lickley Group is glad to talk it through. Request a Confidential Market Consultation whenever you're ready for a conversation grounded in what's actually happening on your street, not just what's listed on a portal.
