Construction of an innovative mixed-income residential project adjacent to the Brownsville Sports Park is on again after a delay of about a year and a half, courtesy of Greater Brownsville Incentive Corporation’s attempt to buy the 200-acre property for an industrial park in 2018.
Phase one of Palo Alto Groves will feature 129 single-family, three- to five-bedroom homes in a range of architectural styles priced at $160,000 to $132,000 and being built by McAllen-based Esperanza Homes, which is marketing the subdivision. The project is the brainchild of Come Dream Come Build, formerly the Community Development Corporation of Brownsville, which owns the property.
“They’ve built a bunch of stuff for us,” said Nick Mitchell-Bennett, CDCB’s executive director. “We’ve gotten used to working with them. They’re really good people. They hire local folks. They’re committed to improving the local economy as much as we are.”
The project is a departure from CDCB’s usual mission of providing quality affordable housing in a place where it’s sorely lacking, in that most of Palo Alto’s phase-one homes are market rate and only 25 to 30 percent will be targeted to low- and moderate-income buyers, who will have access to home-buying assistance through CDCB, he said.
“We are upping our game in the sense that we’re doing a project not just for low-income people,” Mitchell-Bennett said. “We’re not doing that. We’re looking at building a project that is more inclusive of everybody in order to get some other things done. We believe that a mixed community is more of a healthy community. It produces better students and better outcomes for the community as a whole.”
CDCB has always offered conventional mortgage products to higher income home buyers to help fund its programs for low- and moderate-income buyers.
“Most middle-income, higher income people don’t know that,” Mitchell-Bennett said. “We want to be able to avail our services to everyone across the board to help everybody. It’s not to say that we’re stepping away from our mission. We’re not stepping away from our mission at all, but sometimes you’ve got to be able to do some things with a marketplace to help others.”
At last count 20 buyers had signed contracts for Palo Alto homes, with 29 more houses slated for construction “on spec,” meaning they’ll be built first and then sold, he said. Buyers have a choice of multiple designs, square footage, elevations and lot sizes, but in addition to that the subdivision’s entire design reflects CDCB’s approach based on input from the community.
“Our big issue was what do people want? That’s how we started this,” Mitchell-Bennett said. “We want to make sure that folks know that this is a new place, a new way to develop. … With this property we could actually do that. I’m not trying to badmouth any other developer out there or anything, but I’m not trying to maximize the number of lots on a parcel of land.”
Palo Alto features five miles of trail and sidewalks, two parks within its boundaries and the Sports Park across the street, and a new school — IDEA Sports Park — under construction next door to serve the new community.
“We went to them and said we’ve got this parcel of land, what do you think? IDEA was able to move quickly and make a decision,” Mitchell-Bennett said. “We did offer it to Brownsville (Independent School District) and we did offer it to Los Fresnos (Consolidated Independent School District).”
Jennifer Flores, IDEA’s communications manager, said the Sports Park campus launched last year with grades K-2 and 9-10, though the students are using IDEA Robindale until the new building is complete, likely this August. IDEA Sports Park will serve students in grades K-3 and 9-11, and will add a grade level each year “until it is a fully scaled K-12 campus,” she said.
Esperanza Homes has a sales office at the entrance to the new subdivision, where Sports Park Boulevard intersects with Old Alice Road. Curbs, gutters and electric, water, and sewer infrastructure are in place and pouring of streets commenced recently. Phase two will involve the sale of another 80 to 120 lots, with the same number being rolled out each of the next six or seven years, Mitchell-Bennett said.
Palo Alto eventually will consist of 1,000 rooftops, 675 of them homes for sale and the rest rental cottages, both affordable and market-rate, he said.
“The rental market here is absolutely gone haywire,” Mitchell-Bennett said. “There are just not enough units for folks.”
The same can be said of Brownsville housing in general — affordable or otherwise, he said, noting that the city is the third most expensive place in Texas to buy a house with household income factored in.
“That means that almost 50 percent of the population is unable to buy a house here because they don’t earn enough,” Mitchell-Bennett said. “Those who do, there’s not that middle income buying ability because there’s no product. It’s not only a price problem but it’s also a product problem. Realtors will tell you there’s nothing out there.”
The subdivision won’t feature retail inside its boundaries as with some planned communities, though plenty of commercial opportunities exist on city-owned land north of Sports Park Boulevard and also along Old Alice Road, he said. Meanwhile, GBIC is no longer trying to buy the CDCB land and now envisions a light commercial/industrial park on 300 acres it owns just to the east.
“It’s newly designed and it’s quite nice,” Mitchell-Bennett said. “It’s going to create even more jobs in that area.”
Ideally, people employed in the GBIC park could live at Palo Alto and walk or bike to work, he said. Mitchell-Bennett said phase two of the residential project could happen sooner rather than later considering how fast the lots in phase one are selling.
“We’re seeing it move quickly, so we’re already starting to have conversations about phase two, which we didn’t think we would be having for another eight months.”
