According to HousingWire, Howard Hughes Communities is developing an enormous new community called Teravalis about forty miles west of Phoenix on 37,000 acres of desert land. The company, which purchased the property for 600 million dollars back in 2021, already has entitlements for 113,000 homes and roughly 60 million square feet of commercial space. A recent application could push those approvals even higher, potentially enabling more than 130,000 homes that would eventually support around 400,000 residents when the project reaches completion.
What makes this significant is the sheer scale of the undertaking. Teravalis is expected to become Howard Hughes Communities' largest master-planned community yet, surpassing their well-known developments like The Woodlands and Summerlin. The company's leadership indicated this project could take up to 75 years to fully develop, representing a multi-generational effort. The first village, called Floreo, began construction in 2022 and welcomed its first residents last November, with major homebuilders like Lennar, KB Home and Century Communities already partnering on the effort.
Beyond just building homes, Howard Hughes is focused on creating a complete community where residents can live, work, shop and enjoy recreation without necessarily leaving the area. The company is working with architects and designers to establish architectural standards and design principles across all twelve planned villages while allowing each village to maintain its own character. The goal is to strike a balance between creating a cohesive identity for the entire community and remaining flexible enough to adapt to changing market preferences over the decades of development ahead.
Water conservation represents a particular challenge given the desert location, making it a central consideration in the planning process. To build genuine community from day one, Howard Hughes plans to launch programming and events alongside the physical infrastructure. A 22,000-square-foot community center featuring resort-style pools, a pickleball pavilion and fitness facilities is already under construction and should open in 2027.
The company is taking lessons from Summerlin, its successful Las Vegas master-planned community, which features a walkable downtown with retail, office space, entertainment venues and even an 8,000-seat baseball stadium. Teravalis is being designed with entitlements for more than ten times the commercial space approved for Summerlin, suggesting it could eventually become a regional or even national destination rather than just a bedroom community.
What I am seeing locally here in the Bay Area and East Bay is that master-planned communities of this magnitude are increasingly rare, and they represent a completely different development paradigm than what we typically encounter. While our region tends toward infill development and redevelopment of existing sites, projects like Teravalis demonstrate what's possible when developers have the land, entitlements, and capital to think in truly generational terms about building entire new cities from the ground up.
