For Blake Gable, the story of Ave Maria has never been about reaching a set finish line.
Twenty-four years after Barron Collier Companies began work on the Southwest Florida community, the chief executive officer still views the project through the lens of what’s left to accomplish. The latest milestone only reinforces that outlook: county approval to expand Ave Maria from roughly 11,000 planned homes to nearly 18,000, extending development well into the next generation.
“We’re going to be doing this for another generation or so,” Gable says. “Things slowed down for a little bit and that’s fine. We can’t control the macro environment. All we can do is work every day to create the best, safest community for the people that have chosen to call Ave Maria home.”
That long-term perspective has shaped nearly every decision since Barron Collier Companies partnered with philanthropist Tom Monaghan to build a town centered around Ave Maria University.
“When we had the opportunity to meet Monaghan and hear what his vision was for the university, we believed that was a great catalyst for us to build a community around it,” Gable says. “He wanted to start a university with an emphasis on the Catholic faith because he believed that was the best way he knew how to make the world a better place.”
What followed became one of the largest privately funded construction efforts in the Southeast. Roads, utilities, neighborhoods, commercial space and civic infrastructure all had to be built alongside the university itself.
“When you’re doing a project that has 11,000 homes and 25,000 people, you don’t expect it to happen overnight,” Gable says. “We hadn’t done anything of this size and scale before. We just went out and every day figured it out.”
“We had to build miles of infrastructure, a utility plant, the university, a church, and a town center in a very, very short period of time,” Gable says.
Rather than positioning himself as the central figure, Gable credits the team surrounding him.
“I learned early that your ability to be successful requires you to have people around you who are much better at what they do than you could ever be,” he says. “We have a great team that’s exceptionally smart and exceptionally hardworking. The best thing for me to do is get out of their way, make sure we’re all headed in the same direction, and let them figure out how to get there.”
That philosophy has remained constant even as Florida’s real estate cycles have shifted.
“I don’t get too wrapped up in the macro trends because there’s nothing we can do about them,” Gable says. “We know what we can control.”
Looking ahead, Gable says the community’s priorities extend beyond rooftops. A new elementary school and expanded healthcare services are among the developments he believes will help round out Ave Maria as it continues to grow. Today, roughly half of its residents are families, a demographic mix he says is unusual for Southwest Florida and one supported by the community’s affordability and expanding employment opportunities.
For Gable, one of the greatest measures of success increasingly comes from hearing the community discussed far beyond Collier County.
“I run into people all the time talking about Ave Maria,” he says. “A friend of mine was flying to Chicago the other day and texted me that three people across the aisle couldn’t stop talking about it. That used to be few and far between. Now it’s a regular occurrence, and that’s something everybody here is really proud of.”
