Indigo in Fort Bend: A Model for Smart Density And Market Alignment

While Texas lawmakers were busy passing laws this year to make housing more plentiful through modest density measures, a new development near Houston was already on that path.

Indigo, a master-planned community in Fort Bend County designed by JZMK Partners and Dahlin Architecture | Planning | Interiors, demonstrates what can happen with planning: homes priced far below the local average — and selling quickly.

Meristem Communities, the developer, has begun a second phase of cottage homes after selling out the first phase of 16 in just 45 days, starting at $219,000, and the final home selling for $280,000.

Texas, like many states, is working to address the housing shortage puzzle. Facing a deficit of more than 320,000 homes and surging prices, the state has enacted bipartisan reforms aimed at easing construction, diversifying housing choices, and removing the regulatory barriers that have stifled growth and affordability.

Legislative Context: Opening the Door to More Homes

This year, state lawmakers overrode restrictive city zoning rules, allowing smaller homes on smaller lots and permitting mixed-use developments in areas previously reserved for commercial use.

Bills like SB 15 and SB 840 have made it harder for neighbors to block affordable housing, enabled conversions of vacant offices and strip malls into apartments, and streamlined the permitting and rezoning process. Developers can now build single-family homes on lots as small as 3,000 square feet and repurpose commercial properties with fewer restrictions on density and parking.

Indigo's Blueprint: Designing for the New Era

Many of these reforms align closely with Indigo’s original vision: density, diversity, walkability, and attainability.

Meristem Communities and JZMK didn’t simply present their proposal for Richmond as a take‑it‑or‑leave‑it plan. They focused on building support among local officials and the public for their 234‑acre community.

When you go in and try to shove it down their throat—this is what we need, and this is why we need it, and there's not a lot of sound reasoning behind it—that is where you sometimes get the opposition and negativity with a project,” Chris Fernandez, Dahlin’s senior director over creating the plan, says in an interview with The Builder’s Daily.

Fernandez says the first step is educating the public on the demand for housing and the types of housing that are needed.

There's a housing shortage, but it's not what we traditionally think of as the conventional suburban housing tracks that are needed,” he says. “When you look at the data, and it starts to say that only 25% of homeowners are young families, what's the other 75%?”

Fernandez and his team worked to identify the people who would live in Indigo and shared that vision with the local government.

We're not going in saying we need smaller lot sizes and narrower streets so we can be greedy and get more density,” Fernandez says. “We're asking for this because that's what the market wants, that's what the market needs, and that's what the market can afford.”

According to Fernandez, once local leaders saw that the vision was grounded in data and aimed to serve the community’s needs, they supported the plan. This support made the zoning changes required for Indigo relatively easy to secure.

Balancing “Missing Middle” and Larger Homes

Not every home in Indigo will be a cottage or duet, or other form of “missing middle” housing. Scott Snodgrass, a partner in Meristem, says they realized during planning that they went “too exclusive in that direction” with about 60% of the homes qualifying as missing middle.

We started having some people who said they loved the vision of the neighborhood and wanted to live in a neighborhood that's mixed income and is walkable, but they need a bigger house,” Snodgrass says.

In response, Meristem brought back 11 semi‑custom lots on a quarter acre each.

I think it's important to remember that there's nothing wrong with a quarter-acre lot,” Snodgrass says. “Yes, we need to overcorrect in building missing middle housing because it hasn't been built for 50 years, but we have to be careful that we're not pushing so hard on missing middle that it's all we're building going forward.”

Urban planners echo this balanced approach: master-planned communities should mix housing types and price points to avoid replicating the uniform suburban models that many municipalities are now working to change.

David Weekley Homes, Empire Communities, and Highland Homes have contracted for 261 homes in the initial phase. Eventually, Indigo will include 800 homes, a 12‑acre town center, and 42 acres of agricultural land with human‑scale farming.

A Future Aligned with State Policy

Indigo’s success happened even before Texas’s new housing laws, showing that preparation, education, and collaboration with local government can deliver the type of community that policy aims to encourage.

Indigo represents the model Texas now seeks: high-quality homes at diverse price points, in walkable, vibrant districts, unburdened by outdated zoning codes. As statewide reforms take hold, more master-planned communities may follow Indigo’s approach — combining affordability, density, and livability.