Howard Hughes blueprints a 400,000-resident desert community

Forty miles west of downtown Phoenix, in an Arizona desert valley with mountains on three horizons, sits a sweeping, 37,000-acre stretch of land. Not very many people make their home there, but that’s about to change.New cities springing up out of scarcely-inhabited, parched expanses are rare. But once fully built out, a planned mega community property known as Teravalis could be home to more people than currently live in the City of New Orleans.Teravalis may well be destined to become one of the largest master-planned communities in the United States. The vast tract is already entitled for up to 113,000 homes and roughly 60 million square feet of commercial space. A recent application from master developer Howard Hughes Communities, however, could up the number of approved homes to over 130,000, enough to bring the community close to 400,000 residents at full build-out. For Howard Hughes Communities, which bought the land in 2021 for $600 million, developing large master-planned communities is woven into the firm’s DNA, with The Woodlands and Bridgeland outside Houston and Summerlin in Las Vegas among its best-known projects. However, Teravalis, a Latin word that translates to “la...