New Rhodes master-planned community breaks ground near Brownsville Sports Park

An increasingly prolific South Texas master-planned community developer hosted a groundbreaking celebration on Wednesday for its latest project — Villas Las Lagunas — near the Brownsville Sports Park on the north side of the city. 

The first phase of the subdivision, near the intersection of Alton Gloor Boulevard and Paredes Line Road in Brownsville, is a gated community built around resacas. 

Renderings for the subdivision’s first phase show 44 homes, a clubhouse with a gym, swimming pool, pickleball and basketball courts, a dog park, community park, and walking trails. Future phases are expected to have 134 lots overall. At least half a dozen lots for single-family homes have already been sold, according to the developer’s website. 

Home prices range between $260,990 and $317,990 depending on the model, which includes single-story and two-story homes with either 2-bedroom, 3-bedroom, or 4-bedroom layouts between 1,725 square feet and 2,472 square feet. 

The project sits between Interstate 69 East and Texas Highway 550, which leads to downtown Brownsville and the Port of Brownsville, respectively. It’s about two miles east of Valley Regional Medical Center, the Hospital Corporation of America-owned facility with 214 hospital beds and roughly 1,000 employees in Brownsville. 

Rhodes Enterprises’ housing portfolio has grown significantly in the past few years, with projects stretching from Brownsville to Laredo and 7,000 acres of master-planned developments. 

For example, each year the Rhodes group of companies facilitates more than 800 single-family home sales, according to its website. 

The McAllen-based company is a vertically integrated developer co-founded by Mike and Lori Rhodes, but about a decade ago, their son, Nick Rhodes, took over daily operations and expansion efforts. 

Rhodes operates Esperanza Homes as its builder, Stonewood Home Lending and Valley Affordable Mortgage as the financing arms, a rental home division known as Rhodes Living, and Rhodes Property Management and Rhodes Home Service for management and maintenance of both the master-planned communities for homeowners and renters alike. 

The Rhodes development business model typically includes land outside city limits but within the extraterritorial jurisdiction of the community, a tax increment reinvestment zone deal, or TIRZ. The way it works is that developers pay for infrastructure up front and are reimbursed through higher property taxes on the higher land value. 

It was not immediately clear whether the Villas Las Lagunas project is using such a structure. 

But there’s “more to come,” Nick Rhodes said, teasing another project in Brownsville. The Estrella Reinvestment Zone, a tax increment reinvestment zone in Brownsville, is in the works as Rhodes continues to focus on its next venture, a master-planned community spanning 1,000 acres with more than 3,200 single-family homes expected. That project is still going through the permitting process this summer. 

The Estrella community would sit just north of the Texas-550 toll road that leads to the Port of Brownsville, where there’s been a flurry of new economic development projects, from LNG to Saronic Technologies and SpaceX.