With the land to accommodate it, Manvel officials said they hope to house those new residents in single-family neighborhoods, Manvel Mayor Dan Davis said.
Meanwhile, Pearland and Friendswood are limited on space, and city officials believe multifamily paired with other projects will maximize the remaining undeveloped land. Doing so is essential to maintaining a strong tax base and high standard of living, Pearland Director of Community Development Vance Wyly said.
“We want to be a place where you can graduate high school and find your first apartment, or offer transitional living for those who are downsizing,” Wyly said.
Diving in deeper
From 2016 to 2024, Pearland approved nearly 1,800 new apartment units across eight projects, according to city data. Friendswood has more than 600 units currently planned or under construction and another 200 or so recently built out.
Manvel, by comparison, has no existing multifamily developments within its city limits, Davis said. Of the city’s 17,510 acres, less than 10 acres are zoned exclusively for multifamily living, according to the city’s zoning maps.
Wyly said accepting multifamily developments isn’t new for Pearland, as the city has always been open to such developments. However, the city has what Wyly called a high barrier to entry.
Certain features, such as amenities, location, quality of build and its connectivity with the surrounding community are factors the city looks for before moving forward with such a project, Wyly said.
“We have a high expectation of the product,” Wyly said. “It’s about the quality and not a specific design.”
The cause
As Pearland approaches build-out, the number of houses being built is slowing down at a “significant” pace, Wyly said.
“I think a lot of communities, as they approach build-out, those [housing] numbers are going to kind of settle,” Wyly said.
For Manvel, the number of homes under construction has increased in the past decade or so after remaining fairly stagnant for much of the 2000s, data shows.
Davis said many of the new residents coming to Manvel are coming from places like Pearland. Fewer homes being built around the area combined with a desire to stay in the general vicinity is causing many to come to the burgeoning city.
“We don’t want to do something because it’s the way [other cities] do it,” Davis said. “It’s our job as public servants to prioritize [what residents want].”
Zooming out
The increasing number of apartment projects in the Greater Houston area is tied to more than just certain cities’ development goals, Apartment Data Services President Bruce McClenny said.
Across the area, apartment projects are being delivered in droves, McClenny said.
This in part has to do with the post-COVID-19 economy, which has seen new units being leased “like we’ve never seen before,” McClenny said.
That, combined with the market reopening in 2021-22 following the peak of the pandemic, created a surge of pitches for apartment developments, he said. Those developments are now wrapping up, which has flooded the market with new units in some areas.
In the three submarkets Apartment Data Services tracks that make up the Pearland and Friendswood area, there are more than 3,600 units across a dozen projects either recently built in the past year, under construction or proposed, data shows.
“Occupancy went up, rents went up and financing was still low. ... That [created] a 50-year high in construction,” McClenny said. “It’s definitely more than we’ve ever seen.”
What's next?
The last few acres of land for a city are typically the hardest to develop, Wyly said, as the easiest land is typically what gets developed first, making land with more challenges the last to see work.
Despite this, the last 15% of land for Pearland will be critical to making the city sustainable for years to come.
As part of that, Pearland officials are looking to approve the city’s newest comprehensive plan in July, which will help map out the remaining undeveloped land.
Friendswood officials gave a similar answer in an email. With roughly 2,000 acres left to develop, the goal is to lessen the tax impact on current residents and pair complementing developments, like commercial and multifamily, together.
Meanwhile, Manvel officials are creating the city’s first strategic plan, which is expected to wrap up in early 2025 and will help guide officials how to use the city’s land.
“People want to move to Manvel, and as I talk to them ... they love seeing all the green space,” Davis said. “They love not experiencing traffic and congestion.”
Cassandra Jenkins contributed to this article.
