In The Highlands, Your Tax Rate Is Tied to Houses That Don't Exist Yet

What does it actually cost to buy into a neighborhood that is only a quarter finished?

That is the question worth asking before writing an offer in The Highlands, the 2,300-acre master-planned community Caldwell Communities is building off the Grand Parkway in Porter. Not because the community has a problem. It has an 18-hole golf course, a lazy river, more than 30 miles of trails through the piney woods along the San Jacinto River, and a Greater Houston Builders Association award for Master Planned Community of the Year in 2024. The question matters because the price tag you see today and the tax rate that comes with it are both doing math on a community that has a long way to go before it stops growing.

The Rate Is Attached to the Rooftops, Not the Amenities

Here is the part that gets lost in the tour of the model homes. The Highlands sits inside a Municipal Utility District, the entity Texas uses to finance roads, water, and sewer infrastructure in a new development before the city services that would normally cover those costs exist. A MUD sells bonds to build that infrastructure up front, then repays the debt through a property tax assessed on whoever owns land inside the district. The math is simple in structure and easy to miss in practice: the same bond debt gets divided across however many rooftops currently sit on the tax rolls.

That is why the estimated combined tax rate for The Highlands, published for the 2025 tax year, runs around 3.13 percent, with the MUD portion set at 1.25 percent. It is not a punishment for buying new construction. It is what the math looks like when infrastructure built for 4,000 homes is currently being paid down by a district that, as of this summer, had completed roughly a quarter of that total, according to Community Impact's reporting on the community's marketing coordinator.

Put another way: a buyer who closes today is one of a smaller group of taxpayers carrying a debt load sized for a much larger neighborhood. As more sections get built and more homes go on the tax rolls, that same debt gets spread thinner. It is the built-in logic of MUD financing in Texas, and it is worth understanding before you assume the rate on the listing is simply the going rate for the area. It is the going rate for this stage of the district.

What a Quarter-Built Community Looks Like on the Ground

The build-out timeline is not just a financing abstraction. It shows up in daily life, and it shows up on a schedule you can actually check.

Highlands Elementary opened for the 2025 to 2026 school year, an onsite K through 5 campus and a candidate for the International Baccalaureate Primary Years Programme. Its first fifth-grade class is transitioning to Pine Valley Middle School this school year, an existing New Caney ISD campus a few miles away, because the onsite Highlands Middle School will not open until fall 2027. Porter High School, which currently serves more than 2,100 students, is in the middle of an $18.5 million round of upgrades to its fine arts, career and technical education, and athletics facilities.

The amenity side follows the same pattern. A 16,502-square-foot fitness center, a $3 million addition confirmed in a February 2026 filing with the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation, is targeted for completion by the third quarter of 2027, though the developer has noted that date is subject to change. Until then, residents have the existing golf clubhouse, the resort-style pool, the lazy river, and Mirror Lake Park, but not yet the standalone fitness campus shown in the community's own renderings.

None of this is a defect. It is what buying into a community mid-build actually means: a real and growing list of amenities, delivered in phases, alongside a construction footprint that is not going away soon. If you tour a section under active development, expect the sounds and traffic that come with it. That is not a temporary inconvenience before the "real" neighborhood arrives. For a community still years from its planned 4,000-home total, ongoing construction is closer to a permanent condition of living there right now.

The Price Ladder Is Also Being Built in Phases

The Highlands does not have one price point. It has several, layered by section and by how far along each one is.

The spread is not random. Earlier sections were priced when less of the community existed. Later and more specialized sections, like Fairway Pines with its own clubhouse and lifestyle coordinator, or the custom-home enclave built by Drees, are priced closer to what a more finished version of The Highlands is worth. If you are comparing a listing in an early general section against one in Fairway Pines or The Highlands 75, you are not just comparing square footage. You are comparing two different points on the same build-out curve.

What This Means If You Are Comparing Communities

For a buyer weighing The Highlands against a more established Montgomery County neighborhood, the entry price can look like the whole story. It is not. The number that deserves equal attention is the tax rate, because it is telling you something the price alone cannot: how much of the community's infrastructure debt you are personally underwriting today, versus how much gets absorbed by the neighbors who move in over the next several years.

That is not a reason to avoid The Highlands. Structured correctly, a MUD is one of the mechanisms that makes new-construction pricing here competitive with nearby established communities in the first place. But it does mean the calculation is a little more involved than comparing a monthly payment against a comparable square footage in Kingwood or The Woodlands. You are also underwriting a bet on how quickly the remaining three-quarters of the community gets built, because that pace is what eventually spreads your MUD assessment across more rooftops.

A Few Questions Worth Asking Before You Write an Offer

Will the tax rate go down as more homes get built? MUD rates are structured to be repaid by whoever is on the tax roll at a given time, and as more homes are added to the base, the same debt is typically spread across more taxpayers. Whether the published rate actually declines depends on the district's future bond issuances and build-out pace, so ask your title company or the district directly for the most current adjusted rate before closing rather than relying on a figure published for a prior tax year.

Does it matter which section I buy into? It can. A home in an already-built section is buying into infrastructure that is largely finished. A home in a section still under active construction may carry lower entry pricing but comes with a longer runway of construction traffic and dust as a daily condition, not a temporary one.

What happens to HOA obligations as sections like Fairway Pines mature? Age-restricted and amenity-heavy sub-sections can carry their own assessment on top of the base community fee. Ask specifically what the current combined obligation is for the section you are considering, since it can differ meaningfully from the community-wide baseline.

The Highlands is a genuinely well-built community with amenities most Montgomery County neighborhoods do not offer at this price point. The tax rate and the construction timeline are not reasons to walk away from it. They are simply the parts of the story that do not show up on the listing sheet, and they are worth understanding on their own terms before you decide which section, and which stage of build-out, fits what you are actually looking for.

If you are comparing The Highlands against other Montgomery County communities, John and Nicole Cartee at Odyssey Group can walk through the section-by-section differences, current tax estimates, and builder timelines with you directly. Schedule a consultation to talk through what the numbers actually mean for your specific search.