MESQUITE, Texas — Read this story and more North Texas business news from our partners at the Dallas Business Journal
The sprawling 1,400-acre Solterra master-planned community in Mesquite has welcomed its first residents.
Real estate firm Huffines Communities is developing what should be a 3,200-home community on Lucas Farms southwest of East Cartwright Road and both northwest and southeast of Lucas Boulevard. The Dallas-based developer hosted a ribbon-cutting April 5 celebrating its progress and introducing the community to the Dallas-Fort Worth area.
So far, the development has 67 homes completed with residents living in them. An additional 83 residents are set to move in by the end of the year. A team of 13 builders including First Texas Homes, Brightland Homes and Historymaker Homes are constructing houses for the site, and home prices currently start at roughly $350,000 and range up to about $750,000.
Amenities such as a 27-acre lake and a lookout treehouse park designed and built by Washington-based treehouse design firm Nelson Treehouse, which starred on Animal Planet’s "Treehouse Masters," have also been completed. Other community features include dog parks, an indoor event ballroom space and 15 miles of bike and hiking trails. The clubhouse and three-pool complex are currently under construction, said Phillip Huffines, co-founder and co-owner of Huffines Communities.
Phase one of the housing development will deliver about 750 homesites, and Huffines expects most of the sites that the firm develops will have homes on them in the next 18 months. The company plans to invest about $30 million in landscaping and amenities for the first phase and anticipates Solterra to be a 10-year project.
"We've spent the last few decades really studying what homeowners value, what they would like to see in their communities, where children play and what is popular," Huffines said. "We think when we finish with all of the construction and implementation of all those ideas that we've satisfied 100% of what we know that the homeowners are going to enjoy, especially with families. We try to create these communities for fun, families and memories."
Huffines anticipates Solterra will have a property tax value of about $1.7 billion once it's complete. Kim Buttram, director of economic development for Mesquite, estimates the community will bring roughly 10,000 new residents to the city, making it the largest housing development in Mesquite’s history.
Roughly 77% of the Mesquite residents are people of color, and one in five is foreign born, Buttram said. She expects the influx of people will further to further diversify the city, which has a population of roughly 148,000, and to attract more private sector activity.
In 2023, nine companies expanded into the area and pledged to create 2,800 jobs, according to data tracked by the city. Much of the business expansion happening in the city has been manufacturing. New industrial sectors such as automative have emerged and attracted companies such as Hexagon Purus to Mesquite.
Buttram said the city has 400 acres of land positioned and ready for about 7 million square feet of industrial development.
Solterra "brings us more residents, tax base, shoppers and employees,” she said.
"When companies are looking at our region, they're looking at the makeup of the workforce," Buttram said. "With the homes being built in Solterra, the people who buy those higher-priced homes have to have higher incomes. So the assumption is then our companies will have [people with] higher skill sets nearby, and that gives us a selling point in attracting those higher-skill and higher-wage paying companies."
Solterra isn’t the only large neighborhood being developed by Huffines. The company plans a 2,010-acre community called Lakesong in Grand Prairie and Midlothian, set to feature roughly 3,000 single-family lots, about 2,000 multifamily units and 37 acres of mixed-use development, according to the firm’s website. Huffines anticipates starting construction on the community in the next six months.
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