Silverstrand

Both names are in government records, and you need both to find anything about this land. Silverstrand is the forward name, and it is not merely a street sign: Lee County's own development-order record for the second phase of the project carries Silverstrand Phase 2 as the project name. The county writes it. But the master project is recorded under an older, ranchland-derived name, Cary Duke Povia, taken from the families who ranched this land for most of a century before selling it. That older name is what the zoning case, the water management district's environmental permit and the 2025 state special act all use, and it is also what the first phase is still filed under in the same county database. So Silverstrand is not the official name of the whole development, and we are not going to tell you it is. We title this page Silverstrand because that is the name moving forward and the one you are most likely to see on a sign, and we repeat Cary Duke Povia throughout because that is where the records live. What nobody can tell you yet is the retail marketing name, because no consumer brand has been released.

Approved three separate ways by three different public bodies, with a fourth layer added by the state legislature, and each approval stands on its own. First, the Lee County Board of County Commissioners adopted the rezoning resolution for this land in spring 2025, taking it from agricultural to a residential planned development at 1,099 dwelling units, on a unanimous vote. Second, the South Florida Water Management District issued the environmental resource permit for the full 788 acres in winter 2026. That is an individual permit of the kind that authorises construction, not a petition or a determination. Third, Lee County issued a site-work order in spring 2025 for the offsite utility improvements serving this project, and county sewer has been extended to the site as a result. Fourth, the Florida Legislature created a stewardship district over these lands by special act in 2025, which is a separate subject covered elsewhere on this page and matters to your wallet. What is still open, and we want to say it plainly because it is both true and useful: two county construction-plan reviews covering the phases were still in review as of autumn 2026. Those reviews are the gate a final plat has to pass through, which is why no plat has recorded and why no lot legally exists yet.

Four street names sit on the Lee County addressing record for this land: Silverstrand Boulevard, Palladium Circle, Smoky Quartz Crossing and Sparkling Lakes Way. Addresses have been assigned. That is a genuinely useful and specific thing to know, and it is also the part people most often get wrong, so here is the careful version. These names come from the county's addressing record. They do not come from a recorded plat, because no final plat has recorded here. Addressing often runs ahead of plat recording, and a street name on an addressing record is a real administrative fact without being a finished road or a legal lot line. One local wrinkle worth knowing if you go looking: Lee County has no modern plat book at all, so there is no book and page citation to ask anybody for, even once a plat does record here. If somebody hands you one for this community, be sceptical. When the plat finally records, the lot lines, dimensions and street layout become public for the first time, and that is the moment a buyer who already knows the ground can act on it.

Neal Communities of Southwest Florida is the permittee of record on the environmental resource permit and the applicant of record on the county cases. It assembled this roughly 788 acres in 2026 for about 34.1 million dollars. It is not selling here yet, and that is the single most important thing to understand about this page. There is no sales centre, no model, no price list, no floor plan and no release. We are not affiliated with the developer, we are not endorsed by it and we do not speak for it. What has been published is a schedule, and it is the developer's own: groundbreaking in early 2027, model homes around spring 2027 and first home deliveries in 2028. Treat every one of those as a target subject to change, because that is what they are. Development schedules on an 1,099-unit master plan move with permitting, utilities, materials and the market, and this one still has two county construction-plan reviews in front of it. What we can tell you is what is of record, which is the whole purpose of this page, and what is of record is an entitlement, a permit, a utility order, assigned addresses and a published intention.

Almost certainly, and this is the most consequential thing on this page. In 2025 the Florida Legislature created the Duke Farm Stewardship District by special act, covering roughly 1,132 acres in Lee County. A stewardship district of this kind is an infrastructure financing vehicle. It can levy annual benefit special assessments to repay bonds, collected on your county tax bill in the same manner as taxes. It can impose maintenance assessments for ongoing upkeep of district facilities, and those become a lien on the property until they are paid. It can issue bonds and borrow. It can set rates, fees and charges for the systems it runs, with the authority to shut off water and sewer service for nonpayment. Functionally that works much like a community development district, which is the thing Florida buyers have usually heard of, and it sits on top of your ordinary property taxes and any association dues rather than replacing them. Now the two honest limits. No assessment has been levied yet, and no per-lot amount has been published. We will not estimate one and you should distrust anybody who does. And the district's acreage is larger than this site, so it appears to span more than one of the developer's nearby holdings; the precise boundary against this particular land has not been established. Ask for the district's assessment schedule in writing before you sign anything, and ask specifically what the debt portion is per lot and how many years it runs.

Not established, and we are going to say that rather than guess in either direction, because both the yes and the no would be fabrications. What is settled is that the stewardship district exists over these lands by special act of the legislature, and that it is the live financing instrument here. Whether a conventional Chapter 190 community development district also overlies the same land is something we could not determine from the public record we could reach. Given that a stewardship district already exists, a second overlapping district seems unlikely, but unlikely is not the same as established and we are not going to publish it as one. This matters practically. A great many community pages will cheerfully tell you a community has no community development district, which sounds like good news and is often simply unchecked. The question to put to whoever eventually sells you a home here is not whether there is a district but how many separate non-ad-valorem lines will appear on the November tax bill, what each one is for, what each one costs per year, and which of them are liens on the property.

This part of Alva is a patchwork, and the honest answer is that it depends on exactly where in the site a lot ends up. The envelope covering this land and its surroundings is partly mapped inside the special flood hazard area and partly mapped outside it, with base flood elevations published in the single-digit to low-teens range in feet on the parts that are mapped inside. There is a regulatory floodway along a creek that crosses the property, which is a stricter designation again and a real constraint on what can be built where. The flood mapping covering this reach was revised and took effect in 2024, which means older mapping printouts and older flood-zone claims about this area may be out of date. Here is the part no brochure will tell you: a lot-level determination is not possible before lots exist. There is no recorded plat here, so there are no lots, no lot lines and nothing to run a determination against. Anybody who tells you today whether your future lot is mapped inside or outside the special flood hazard area is inventing it. What you do when lots exist is ask, in writing, for that specific lot's flood determination and its finished-floor elevation, not the community's. And ask for a flood insurance quote alongside your wind quote before your inspection period closes, because whether the lot is mapped inside or outside decides whether flood cover is a lender requirement or your own choice.

This is the best question to ask about this location and it has a genuinely two-sided answer. The site sits roughly two miles downstream, which is to say west, of the W.P. Franklin Lock on the Caloosahatchee. The good half of that: Franklin is the river's last lock before the Gulf, so a boat on this reach runs the remaining river miles out to the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway without locking through anything. No chamber, no lift, no waiting on a schedule. Buyers upriver of Franklin, in the stretch toward LaBelle and Lake Okeechobee, do not have that, and it is a real and permanent advantage of being on this side of the structure. The half nobody advertises: the same geography puts this land on the brackish, tidal, downstream side of the salinity barrier, and downstream is the side that receives Lake Okeechobee water when the Army Corps opens the Caloosahatchee spillways, as it did in 2026 with a public warning to boaters. The structure itself is also worked hard. It was closed outright in late 2024 because of silting around the gates, reopened at a reduced width, and closed again in spring 2025 for diving work. So the river you look at in January is not always the river you get in September. One more thing we cannot tell you: whether any developable lot in this community will actually touch the Caloosahatchee, or whether a community boat facility is planned. With a large share of the acreage going to retention and conservation, the river-adjacent land may well end up on the conservation side. Nobody should promise you river frontage here today.

Alva is the last genuinely rural place in Lee County, and that is both the appeal and the thing to think hard about. It is a river town on the north bank of the Caloosahatchee, roughly twenty miles upriver from downtown Fort Myers, where pasture still runs to the road and a horse trailer in a driveway is not a lifestyle statement. This community's own land was cattle ranch for the better part of a century before it was rezoned. The texture of the place is multi-generation landholding families, not subdivisions, and you should know going in that a great many of your neighbours did not want 1,099 houses here and said so, publicly and specifically, at the podium. The county commission approved the rezoning unanimously anyway. If you buy here you are buying the first chapter of Alva's change, and the people already there know it. On the practical side of rural: the realistic route west is along the north bank of the river, or south over the river to the state road corridor and then west to the interstate. Both are long two-lane rural runs, and that corridor is where every new rooftop in east Lee County funnels. We are not going to publish drive times, because we did not measure them and nobody should take an invented number for a commute they will make twice a day. Drive it yourself at 7:40 on a Tuesday morning before you sign anything. That single hour will tell you more than any page can.

On taxes, this is unincorporated Lee County, so the bill is the county stack with no city millage on top: the county general rate, the two school components, the library district, the unincorporated services levy, mosquito and hyacinth control, water management, inland navigation, an all-hazards component, and an independent fire district serving Alva. We are not publishing a combined total, because the fire district's own current rate was not something we could confirm, and a total built on a guess is worse than no total. Get the number from the property appraiser's own estimator for the specific address once one exists. The mechanics matter more than the rate anyway. A brand-new home is assessed on land plus completed improvements at full market value on the first January 1 after completion, with no prior-year value anchoring it, so the first full tax year is the expensive one. Florida's Save Our Homes cap limits assessment growth to three per cent or the change in the consumer price index, whichever is lower, but it only starts the year after you establish homestead; year two is the first protected year. Non-homestead property is capped at ten per cent. Florida homestead relief totals 51,411 dollars of assessed-value reduction, and that figure is set by statewide Florida law rather than by Lee County, with the additional portion not applying to school millage. On insurance, two things are true at once and buyers constantly conflate them. East Lee County is well inland, roughly twenty river miles from the Gulf, so this is not the storm-surge geography that devastated the barrier islands and the coastal canals in 2022. But wind does not care about distance from the coast: that storm crossed inland as a major hurricane, and Lee County sits in Florida's highest wind-design territory. The exposure here is riverine and rainfall flooding, not surge. Practically: get a bindable wind quote and a separate flood quote before your inspection period closes, and ask whether the home is built to the current Florida building code wind standards for Lee County, because new construction is, and that is the real insurance advantage over 1990s resale stock. We are not quoting premium figures, because we could not establish them for this location and an invented range is worthless to you.

The School District of Lee County, and we are deliberately not naming a school, for a reason that is useful rather than cautious. Lee County does not run the simple address-to-school system most people expect. It is a choice-based district: your address places you in a proximity zone, and then you apply through the district's process, with placement driven by proximity and seat availability rather than by a fixed guarantee that a given street address attends a given school. The district has also changed its zones and its enrollment process repeatedly in recent years, and it was still revising the process in the most recent cycles. So assignment is not guaranteed by street address, and anybody who hands you a confident list of assigned schools for an unbuilt community in Lee County is telling you something the district itself does not promise. We also could not establish which proximity zone this particular site falls in, which is exactly why we are not naming a school instead of naming one and hedging it. What to do about it: verify the current assignment for a specific address directly with the district before you buy, in writing, and do it again close to closing if your delivery is a year or more out, because the answer can move.

Mostly it involves reading the parts of a contract that nobody reads, and doing it before there is any pressure on you, which is the one genuine advantage of being this early. On a pre-construction purchase the money is in the mechanics. What happens to your deposit if the schedule slips, and how far can it slip before you have a right to walk. Whether the price is fixed or subject to escalation for materials or for changes to the plan. What the published specification actually includes, as against what the model home is finished with, which is almost never the same list. What the warranty covers, who administers it, and what the process is for a defect found after closing. Then there are four questions that are specific to this land. What the recorded plat shows for your lot's dimensions and street, once it records. What the stewardship district assessment will be per lot, split between debt service and maintenance, and for how many years the debt portion runs. Whether your particular lot is mapped inside or outside the special flood hazard area, and what its finished-floor elevation is. And what the utility arrangement is for your lot, given that county sewer has been extended to the site. Hire your own independent inspector at pre-drywall, at the final walkthrough, and again before the one-year warranty expires. One disclosure in the other direction: we did not search Florida regulatory enforcement records or civil dockets for any entity connected to this community, so read the absence of such a note here as unchecked rather than clean.

Because the next few milestones here arrive in a bundle, and the bundle is where the decisions get made. The county construction-plan reviews finishing is the first gate. A recorded plat follows, and with it the lot lines, the dimensions and the street layout. Then a groundbreaking, then models, then a specification, then a price list, and somewhere in there the stewardship district's first assessment figure. Each of those is a moment when a buyer who already knows the ground can act and a buyer who finds out from a sign cannot. Right now there is nothing to buy, no price to beat and no deposit to put down, so joining a list costs nothing and commits you to nothing. What it does is put you in front of a real estate professional licensed in Florida who represents you rather than the seller, before you put your own name on a registration form, which is the one step in this process that is genuinely hard to undo. We will tell you when the plat records, when the district publishes an assessment, when models are permitted and when the first price appears.