A master planned community in Fort Bend County will have an agricultural bent.
Houston-based Meristem Communities plans to break ground on its 235-acre development, Indigo, this month, the Houston Business Journal reported. The project will be located between Richmond and Sugar Land.
Meristem’s plan calls for 750 houses and multifamily units as well as 70,000 square feet of commercial space. A town center will have a multipurpose barn, market and cafe as well as parks and a 25-acre lake.
About 42 acres will be reserved for a farm with livestock pasture and crop fields whose produce will be for sale. Walkability and accessibility are also a focus.
“Eighty-five percent of our homes are within a quarter mile of what we’re calling Indigo Commons, which is our little town center,” co-founder Scott Snodgrass told the outlet.
Snodgrass and his co-founder Clayton Garrett also run Agmenity, which develops and manages agricultural amenities for residential communities. They have owned the Indigo land since 2016 and currently use half of the property for farming. They saw the rise in popularity of master-planned communities and decided to build their own with a focus on people, walkability and agriculture.
“The goal is to have people really connect deeply with their neighbors and understand their neighborhood in a different way than you see in what we consider a traditional master plan,” Garrett said.
The homes will be built by David Weekley Homes, Highland Homes and Empire Communities. There will be 500 detached single-family homes, 100 duplexes, 54 three-story townhomes and a 100-unit apartment building with ground-floor retail.
“We don’t want to be type-casted as master-planned community developers,” Snodgrass told the outlet. “I think we’ll do other kinds of development as well, whether it’s commercial retail development in the city (or) whether it’s rehabbing an old, worn-out strip center in the suburbs that’s no longer performing well and turning it into a place that people want to be in.”
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— Victoria Pruitt