Bolivar’s Peninsula Beach Resort on Ice Due to EB-5 Funding Challenges

  BOLIVAR PENINSULA, Texas — The largest commercial project ever planned on Bolivar Peninsula is on ice for now.

  Bolivar Investment Group has paused the development of Peninsula Beach Resort, a planned mixed-use beach resort on 110 acres in Crystal Beach. The $65 million project, which was announced in early 2023, failed to get funding through the EB-5 immigrant investor program, Bolivar Investment Group Principal Michael Wiglesworth told the Houston Business Journal.

  “Unfortunately, our EB-5-approved development commitment fell through in (December 2024), due to faulty USCIS statistical analysis that showed Bolivar had zero unemployment,” he said. “For the past 12 years, Bolivar always showed the minimum unemployment reporting that qualified for our EB-5 regional center application.”

  When reached by the Houston Business Journal, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services said it cannot provide case-specific information to anyone other than the applicant.

  The EB-5 program connects prospective immigrants with job-creating projects to invest in exchange for green cards. The projects must be in so-called targeted employment areas, census tracts that are either in rural or high-unemployment areas, to qualify for a reduced investment minimum of $800,000. Wiglesworth said his investment group opted to finance the project this way because of its beneficial interest rate. “EB-5 money is cheap; it’s 4.5%,” he said. “You can’t find that in the commercial market.”

 The original plan for Peninsula Beach Resort at 1520 State Highway 87 was to develop 90 single-family beach homes on 15 acres, 117 rental cottages with a clubhouse and two pools, 50 RV sites with overhead cabins, five condo towers totaling 160 units on the beach, a restaurant and spa, a three-level beachside bar and grill, a retail development with 1,400 feet of frontage along Highway 87, and a private small-engine airport just across the road.

 The plan was to first build the 41,000-square-foot Zoo Beach Bar & Grill along with parking for more than 350 cars, followed by the cottages, clubhouse and spa/restaurant.

 About a third of the site’s streets and infrastructure have already been completed, Wiglesworth said.

  The other partners in the developers group originally included real estate investor and developer Jim Hayes; Tom Harrison, owner of construction company Allco LLC; Curtis Hampton, president of Cobalt Engineering and Inspections LLC; and James “J.W.” Turner, president and CEO of James W. Turner Construction Ltd.

  While they all have exit strategies just in case, Wiglesworth said he is optimistic they will be able to pick up the development, either through EB-5 — if USCIS finds a higher unemployment rate for the area when it revises its numbers in a couple of years — or through different funding sources.

  This could mean changing the original development plans or developing the site incrementally, starting with the beach bar and grill. “The land’s not going anywhere,” he said. “It’s prime beach property, so we’re just wait-and-see, and hopefully later this year there’ll be some opportunities to keep moving. But we have a lot of money invested in it, several million dollars in the ground. … It’s a diamond in the rough, and we’re fully enthusiastic about eventually developing.”

  The nearby Camp Margaritaville Resort Crystal Beach is proof of the demand for resort-type developments on Bolivar Peninsula, Wiglesworth said. The 150-acre RV resort at 796 State Highway 87 has been growing every year since opening in 2022, with 40,000 nights booked for 2025 as of last July, according to the resort’s owner, Brad Ballard.

 The peninsula — which was virtually leveled by Hurricane Ike in 2008 and since rebuilt — had seen an increase in home sales in recent years, primarily for second homes and vacation rentals, according to local brokers. However, the housing market has now slowed, Wiglesworth said.

  Bolivar continues to be underserved when it comes to commercial development, including retail and medical offices, as well as utility infrastructure. Another previously announced Bolivar development did not happen. Two of the investors involved in Peninsula Beach Resort — Hayes and Harrison — recently sold the land they had planned to use for a 30-unit beach home development at Rettilon Road to Houston Audubon Society for the Bolivar Flats Shorebird Sanctuary.