Grand Prairie’s 40-foot Overlook offers sunset views over Lake Ember, a 70-acre man-made reservoir that also provides flood control.
Harry Masterson was driving home from an event in Hockley when he passed a young boy riding a bicycle, carrying a fishing rod and a tackle box. Straight out of The Andy Griffith Show reruns, the scene told the longtime developer that his instincts about his newest project, the Grand Prairie, were right: People want neighborhoods with a sense of community.
In 2024, Masterson, the managing director at Ember Real Estate Investment and Development, and his team broke ground on the first Grand Prairie homes in Hockley. Already, the far-west Harris County development has more than 1,000 homes and ranks among the top-selling residential developments in Houston and across Texas, according to real estate research firms RCLCO and Zonda. Designed to foster a community feel and an appreciation for the outdoors, this neighborhood boasts miles of walking trails and a 70-acre pond that doubles as a flood mitigation project. Soon, they’ll break ground on an amenities center, a gathering place that overlooks swimming pools, trails, and a lake. Set on a high perch, it will also offer stunning views of the looming Katy prairie and every sunset.
A similar trend is emerging in other suburban areas. This past March, development began on Austin Point, a Signorelli Company neighborhood in Fort Bend County with more than 60 homes, including ones marketed as “right-sized,” with smaller rooms and a more modest square footage.
In neighborhoods like these, narrower streets force drivers to slow down, and pocket parks provide residents a place to stop and get to know one another. “We are fronting homes with [shared] green space, and more than half of the homes under construction have front porches,” says Todd Hamilton, director of development for Austin Point. “This isn’t over-the-top sexy, but if you give a place an identity, people will call it theirs.”
That’s suburban home and neighborhood design in 2025.
After an intense half-decade of coping with COVID-19, views on work-life balance have changed, as have perceptions of where we can live and work. Consequently, many people are choosing to live in the suburbs.
As employers eased up on schedules and allowed remote work to continue following the pandemic’s peak, these master-planned communities became increasingly appealing. Now, residents from the outskirts no longer mind driving into Downtown or the Energy Corridor if their bosses let them work from home a few days a week. Plus, new roads, such as the Grand Parkway and dramatically improved Highway 290, lead to quicker commutes.
Houston’s newer suburban communities make use of pocket parks, water amenities, trails, gardens, and more to draw in residents.
The amenities that suburbs offer are also a draw. Contemporary developers and builders rarely consider creating a neighborhood without access to walking or bicycling trails these days, and the common inclusion of water features provides a more natural connection than a swimming pool ever could.
With Harris County at its center and nine additional counties surrounding it, the Houston metropolitan area is expanding in every direction, with Montgomery and Fort Bend Counties leading the way. “The suburbs are adding more households and more people because it’s where you have the classic definition of families: parents with children and multigenerational households,” says Dan Potter, director of the Houston Population Research Center at Rice University’s Kinder Institute for Urban Research.
Fort Bend, considered the most ethnically diverse county in the US, is home to nearly 1 million people, and Montgomery’s population will soon reach 750,000, Potter says. Almost 40 percent of these residents moved to the area as adults and have lived in the Houston area for 14 years or less.
Potter says there’s a push-pull component to why people move to the city’s surrounding communities. “The ‘push’ is about feelings about crime and congestion in Houston,” he says. The “pull” factor? The perception of better school districts, affordability, and safer communities. Baby boomers are known to wax poetic about growing up in neighborhoods that felt secure; parents essentially always knew where their kids were, even if they were playing outdoors all day. “We have a strong desire for that,” says Kat Robinson, vice chair of the Houston Association of Realtors and a broker at Compass. Developers like Ember and Signorelli are tapping into that—offering places where there is “a sense of community, you like your neighbors, and you know the kids riding bikes up and down the streets.”
“They’re making suburbs where everyone can gather and celebrate the individual,” she says.
Water-related amenities, such as pools and man-made lakes, are must-haves in suburban developments these days.
That neighborhood activity isn’t limited to kids riding bikes. Johnson Development’s Harvest Green, deemed an “agrihood,” features a communal
12-acre Village Farm, where residents collaborate to cultivate produce in its gardens and nurture chickens and goats. Cross Creek Ranch in Fulshear, which started in the early 2000s, is another example of an agrihood.
“It seemed so far away.… We thought no one would buy all the way out there,” Robinson says of Cross Creek, but the walking trails, prairie grasses, and nature drew people in. “They created a sense of escape in real life.”
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