22-04-2025
- Business
- Business Journals
Brookfield, CDC Houston developing Midline near Baybrook Mall
The mall's owner is developing the new master-planned community in a joint venture with the company that has owned the land since the 1960s.
Story Highlights Brookfield Residential and CDC Houston are developing the 2,800-home Midline community.
The first phase will include 271 homes priced from the $300,000s to the $700,000s.
Community amenities will include 14 miles of trails with the goal of connecting to Baybrook Mall.
A new master-planned community with around 2,800 single-family homes is coming to the Baybrook Mall area off Interstate 45 southeast of Houston, with first homes expected next year.
Brookfield Residential Properties ULC is developing Midline in a joint venture with New York-based Coventry Development Corp.'s local subsidiary, CDC Houston Inc. Brookfield Property Partners LP (Nasdaq: BPY), a real estate unit of Toronto-based Brookfield Asset Management Inc. (NYSE: BAM), acquired Baybrook Mall and four other local malls as part of a multibillion-dollar deal for GGP Inc. in 2018.
CDC Houston has owned the land — part of what was known as Webster Ranch — since the 1960s. It sold the part that now houses Baybrook Mall to the mall's developer, Homart Development Co., in the late 1970s, according to the company.
Detention work is already underway on the 1,066-acre infill tract, which is located behind Baybrook Mall and runs from El Dorado Boulevard to Grissom Road along the current and planned sections of Beamer Road, the developers said.
Currently, Beamer Road dead-ends at West Bay Area Boulevard. The first community's phase will include building Beamer from FM 528, or West NASA Parkway, to Fife Lane, a street in the adjacent Heritage Park neighborhood that will also be extended, said Matt McCafferty, senior vice president of operations at Brookfield Residential.
That phase, west of Beamer between Fife Lane and FM 528, will include 271 homes on 40-to-70-foot-wide lots and could be priced from the $300,000s to the $700,000s, he said. He anticipates selecting between three to five homebuilders, to be announced later this year.
'We've talked with the builder community, and we believe that we have a high degree of interest,' McCafferty said, adding that he expects lot delivery around the end of the year.
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Midline development plan
Brookfield Residential
Community amenities include parks with pools and playgrounds as well as The Midline Club with indoor event space, a second-story gym, coworking spaces, outdoor splash pad and pool, event lawn and seating areas, slated to open in summer 2027. The parks will be connected by 14 miles of trails.
Glendale, Arizona-based Cohere will manage the homeowners association as well as community events and activities, the developers said.
The second phase will include extending Beamer to Bay Area Boulevard, with lots expected at some point next year. After that, the plan is to add lots east of Beamer and north of Bay Area Boulevard.
Most of those phases are inside Houston's extra-territorial jurisdiction, with some parts recently deannexed from Webster and Friendswood, McCafferty said. The final phase will be south of FM 528, which is in League City, adjacent to Challenger Seven Memorial Park.
Walking to Baybrook Mall
The idea is to have trails for residents to be able to walk to Baybrook Mall, though the exact plan for the connection, which would run through adjacent property, has not been finalized, McCafferty said.
'The idea that you could walk to a mall or a Perry's Steakhouse (on) Day 1 from the grand opening of a 1,000-acre community, it's not found in many opportunities around the city (or even) the country,' he said.
The master plan includes future commercial developments at the intersection of El Dorado and Beamer, across the street from Westbrook Intermediate School, and of Beamer and FM 528.
Brookfield Properties and CDC Houston have already been partnering on The Lawn at Baybrook, the mall's outdoor portion, which opened in 2015.
'Early to mid-2023, we started really advancing our conversations with CDC on what the opportunity could look like to potentially put a master-planned community around the adjacent property around the mall,' McCafferty said.
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Rendering of the entry to Midline near Baybrook Mall
Brookfield Residential
On the other side of I-45, CDC Houston is co-developing the 23-acre H-E-B-anchored retail center Baybrook East with Florida-based Regency Centers (NYSE: REG).
'Since our ownership acquired the old Webster Ranch in the 1960s, of which Midline will be the last major piece to be developed, we have recognized the appeal and potential of the Baybrook trade area,' Warren W. Wilson, executive vice president of CDC Houston, said in a statement. 'We are very excited to partner with Brookfield, a company with a strong track record of community creation, to develop a high-quality planned community on the final piece of the original ranch land.'
Although the Gulf Freeway corridor doesn't have as much room to grow as other parts of Greater Houston, the five school districts that make up the Galveston Bay Area — Clear Creek, Dickinson, Santa Fe, Texas City and Hitchcock — rival the Katy ISD area with a combined 14,709 future lots compared with 15,389, according to a Zonda analysis in early 2024. However, Katy has more than double the number in new home starts.
On the northern side of El Dorado Boulevard, behind Westbrook Intermediate, a group of anonymous investors is planning Clearwater, an up-to-800-acre single-family home community.
In League City, about 5 miles southwest of Midline, Dallas-based Hillwood Communities is developing the 805-acre Legacy community, including a 100-acre city park. And further south along I-45, in Texas City, Starwood Land's 2,033-acre Crystal Lagoon community Lago Mar, which broke ground in 2016, is designed for about 4,000 homes.
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