Hudson Creek

Both, and that is a fact of the public record rather than a marketing decision anybody has announced. Hudson Creek is the older name and still the dominant one: it is the name on both issued water management district permits, on every city sitework permit description, and on all 1,277 addresses the city assigned to this land. Star Farms at Cape Coral is the newer name, and it is winning inside city hall: the community development district established by adopted ordinance in the summer of 2026 carries that name, and the city's own recent subdivision filings read, almost comically plainly, Star Farms of Cape Coral, formerly known as Hudson Creek. There is also a street inside the community already named Star Farms Boulevard, which is a strong hint about where the branding is heading. We title this page Hudson Creek because that is the name you are most likely to have heard and the name the records are indexed under, and we repeat Star Farms at Cape Coral throughout because that is the name the newest records use and either one may be what you search. What nobody can tell you yet is the retail brand, because no consumer-facing community brand has been launched at all. One important warning: there is a completely different, unrelated community called Star Farms at Lakewood Ranch on the other side of Florida, near Sarasota and Bradenton, and it is selling homes today. Almost every web search for Star Farms returns that one. Nothing about its builders, prices or plans applies here.

Much further than most people realise, and it is the kind of thing you can see from the road. Dirt has been moving continuously for about twenty-one months. The first city site development permit passed its pre-construction inspection in January 2025 and has run through well over a hundred inspections since, the most recent of them passing in October 2026. A second permit covering the utility mains has run through a comparable number of inspections, with a utility tap passing in October 2026 and dozens of pressure-pipe and backfill inspections behind it. Rock blasting for lake excavation got its own permit and passed its pre-construction inspection in September 2026. The clearest evidence is the city's own aerial imagery. The 2024 flight shows raw land: flatwoods and wetland mosaic, a couple of two-track dirt roads, one old lake, section lines and nothing else. The 2026 flight shows a continuous spine-road corridor cut diagonally across the whole property, at least three neighbourhood pods graded flat corner to corner with their road loops and cul-de-sacs laid out, five or more newly excavated stormwater lakes already holding water, and perimeter berms and haul roads. And zero structures. Not one slab, not one frame, no model home, no sales trailer. The roads are graded sub-base, not yet paved with curb. So the honest summary is that this is a very large project in the middle of its earthwork phase, with the vertical phase still ahead of it.

Approved, four separate ways, by four different public bodies, and each one of them stands on its own. First, the regional water management district has issued two individual environmental resource permits for this land, one in early 2026 covering the residential core and one in the spring of 2026 covering the commercial side. Individual permits of that kind are the ones that authorise construction, and neither is pending. Second, the city council adopted the mixed-use planned unit development rezoning for this land on a unanimous vote in the spring of 2023, and the city's own permitting system still references that ordinance by name on filings made in 2026. Third, the city council adopted an ordinance in the summer of 2026 establishing the community development district for the community. Fourth, the city has issued six site development, blasting and right-of-way permits, which is where the inspection history comes from. We checked the pending side as well: the water district's pending-applications layer returns nothing for this project, meaning nothing here is sitting in merely-applied status. The one thing that is genuinely zero is vertical. No building permit of any kind has been issued for a home here, and that is a real finding rather than a missing record, because the Cape Coral building permit feed is live and current and returns hundreds of single-family permits elsewhere in the city for the same period. The engineering paperwork is also in flux rather than finished: a preliminary subdivision plan lapsed in the autumn of 2026, a planned-development amendment was filed in the autumn of 2026 and is only at the fees-paid stage, and the phase one plat is in resubmittal. The dirt work continues under its own separately issued permit regardless.

There is no homebuilder for this community. None has been announced, none owns a lot, and no builder could own a lot because no lot legally exists yet. We want to be blunt about that because it is the single most misunderstood thing about a project at this stage. Forestar, the name all over the record, is a residential lot developer and the land arm of D.R. Horton, which owns the majority of it. Forestar is the permittee on both environmental permits, the owner of record on all six master parcels, the applicant on every city case since 2025 and the petitioner that asked the city to create the district. Its business is to entitle land, cut the roads, dig the lakes, run the utilities and then deliver finished lots to homebuilders. It does not build or sell houses, and it is not selling houses here. So when you eventually see a model home on this land, it will carry some homebuilder's name, and today nobody can honestly tell you whose. We are not going to guess, and you should be sceptical of anyone who does. The land was previously owned and entitled by a different development group, which obtained the earlier conceptual environmental permit and the 2023 rezoning before selling the property in late 2024.

This is the single most useful thing on this page, and it comes from the city's addressing records rather than from anybody's brochure. In February 2026, on one single day, the city created 1,277 addresses across this land on twenty-eight named streets. They are, with the largest first: Harborlight Court, which alone carries 156 addresses, then Duskwave Drive, Driftbay Road, Baybend Lane, Wavecrest Road, Ocean Pearl Drive, Aquatide Drive, Oceanview Road, Ocean Tide Road, Harborwake Road, Deepwater Lane, Sunripple Road, Gullwing Court, Tidepool Road, Blue Horizon Drive, Moonwave Drive, Kelp Bay Drive, Seafarer Lane, Sundown Lane, Sailfin Drive, Navigators Lane, Seafoam Drive, Moonjelly Road, Coastline Road, Graysby Drive, Shorebird Court, Seaglass Lane and Star Farms Boulevard, plus frontage on Jacaranda Parkway West. The addressing itself tells you what is being built. There is no unit number, no building number and no floor number anywhere in those 1,277 records, which is what you would expect from detached single-family lots and not at all what stacked or attached product looks like. House numbers run up both sides of each street in four-step increments, which is textbook detached lot addressing. Two broad clusters are visible: a northern and eastern group nearest Chiquita Boulevard North, including Harborlight, Aquatide, Ocean Tide, Kelp Bay, Wavecrest, Sundown, Navigators, Seafoam, Graysby and Shorebird, and a southern group north of Wilmington Parkway, including Baybend, Driftbay, Ocean Pearl, Oceanview, Gullwing, Blue Horizon, Sailfin, Coastline, Seaglass and Star Farms Boulevard. An address is not a house, and none of these streets is finished. But they are real, they are in the city's live records, and they are where this community will physically be.

There is no price, and that is a statement of fact rather than a tease. No price has ever been published for this community, no homebuilder is named, no floor plan or square footage has been released, and there has never been a listing on any of its streets. We can prove that last point rather than assert it: the county property appraiser's parcel roll, which is live and holds more than half a million records, returns zero parcels on any of these street names, because the lots have not been created yet. Nothing that does not exist can be listed, sold or closed. What we can give you is area context, clearly labelled as area context and not as this community's pricing. The Cape Coral median sale price across all homes was $381,075 in August 2026, up about six per cent year over year, with a median of $209 per square foot and a median sixty-six days on market. For ZIP 33993 specifically, the typical home value was $336,893 as of the end of August 2025, which is a year-old figure and we are flagging it as stale rather than dressing it up. Treat all of that as the backdrop against which this community will eventually be priced, and treat nobody's aggregator estimate as a new-construction price. New construction in Cape Coral has historically priced above the existing-stock median because the existing stock is largely 1970s to 2000s houses on legacy lots.

Because the developer is paying for the mains, and this is the most valuable single fact on this page. Cape Coral is still working through the largest municipal utility retrofit in Florida, extending city water, sewer and irrigation into neighbourhoods that were platted decades ago with none of it. Every time the city reaches a new expansion area, the existing property owners in that area are charged a one-time special assessment, payable in full or in instalments on the tax bill. The current estimates the city has put in front of owners in the areas nearest this community run from about $32,000 to about $41,000 per property, depending on which side of Burnt Store Road you are on. That is not a monthly fee. That is a five-figure bill that arrives years after somebody bought their house. This community sidesteps it. Three of the issued city permits here are literally titled as offsite utilities segments, running along Tropicana Parkway from Chiquita Boulevard to Burnt Store Road and then up Burnt Store Road itself, at a combined permit value of more than twenty-three million dollars, with utility taps and pressure tests passing inspection in October 2026. The city attorney confirmed on the record at the summer 2026 council meeting that the developer is funding the utility lines up Burnt Store Road and is installing them now. So a buyer here should expect city water, sewer and irrigation from the day they move in, with the cost of getting it there built into the lot rather than billed separately later. Two caveats, stated plainly. This is the documented arrangement for this community's own infrastructure as of October 2026, and it does not pre-empt any future citywide assessment the city may levy for something else. And you should confirm it in writing at contract rather than taking our word or anybody else's.

Yes, there will be a district, and no, nobody can tell you the amount yet. The district here is not a guess or an expectation: the city council adopted an ordinance in the summer of 2026 establishing it, covering roughly the residential heart of the master and serving a development described as about 2,500 dwellings, with the developer as the petitioner. So treat it as certain. What a district does is worth understanding before you shop here. It is a special-purpose unit of local government that borrows money by issuing bonds, uses that money to build the community's own roads, lakes, landscaping, parks and amenities, and then repays the bonds through an annual assessment that appears on your property tax bill on top of your ordinary ad valorem taxes. That assessment usually has two parts: a fixed debt service portion that runs until the bonds retire, commonly somewhere in the twenty to thirty year range, and a variable operations and maintenance portion that is permanent because the lakes and landscaping still need maintaining after the bonds are gone. What we cannot tell you is the number. No bonds have been issued, no assessment methodology report has been published, and the district has posted no per-home figure as of October 2026. We are not going to invent one. When you eventually sit down with a builder here, the question to ask is not whether there is a district but what the annual assessment per home will be, split between debt service and operations, and for how many years the debt portion runs.

In Cape Coral this is the first question everybody asks, and the answer here is unusually good, with real limits we want to be clear about. We sampled fifty-eight address points spread across all thirty streets in the community against the federal flood mapping, and every single one of them came back mapped outside the special flood hazard area. Fifty-eight out of fifty-eight. To make sure the mapping layer was actually answering rather than quietly returning nothing, we ran a control in the same session against the wider parcel boundaries, and it did return mapped flood hazard area with a published base flood elevation on two nearby tracts, one along Burnt Store Road and one on the southern edge. So the clear result on the residential streets is a real answer and not a data void, and the caveat is equally real: parts of the wider master, along the road frontage and the southern canal, are mapped inside the hazard area. You must check the specific lot once lots exist. The community is also outside the city's coastal high hazard area, which the city's own mapping confirms by returning nothing across the core of this land. What being mapped outside the special flood hazard area does mean is that a mortgage lender will not federally require flood insurance, and that voluntary preferred-risk coverage is dramatically cheaper than the mandatory kind. What it does not mean is that it cannot flood. More than a quarter of federal flood claims nationally come from outside the hazard area, and Lee County proved that in 2022. Buy the cheap policy. On evacuation, the community sits in evacuation zones C and D, with a small north-western edge in zone B. None of it is in evacuation zone A, which is the first zone ordered out and where most of Cape Coral's canal-front housing sits. In an Ian-class storm Lee County ordered zones A and B; C and D come later and only on the most extreme surge forecasts. Be careful how you read that, though. A lower evacuation zone letter is not immunity. Cape Coral took catastrophic wind damage in 2022 across every zone, wind does not respect surge mapping, and evacuation zones are reviewed and can change.

On insurance, new construction in Cape Coral has a genuine and quantifiable advantage. Homeowners premiums across the city run roughly $3,092 to $7,679 a year depending on the age of the house, the roof and the construction type, and we should note that the source for that range does not state an as-of date beyond a 2026 copyright, so treat it as undated. A house built to the current Florida building code lands near the low end, because Florida requires insurers to give actuarially justified wind mitigation credits and a new house earns the whole stack at once: a new roof covering, engineered roof-deck attachment, secondary water resistance, gable-end bracing, roof-to-wall connections and impact-rated openings. The cited relief on the wind portion of a premium runs roughly twenty to fifty per cent. Roof age is also an insurability cliff rather than just a price factor, because many carriers simply decline shingle roofs older than about fifteen to twenty years. On taxes, the documented total Cape Coral millage on the 2025 tax roll was 15.3806 mills, which is about 1.54 per cent of taxable value, combining county, city, school board, water management and several small special districts. For the current cycle the city maintained its operating millage at 5.1471 when it adopted its budget in September 2026. We are not publishing a current-year total because we could not independently confirm final adoption of every component. The mechanics matter more than the rate. A brand-new house is assessed on land plus completed improvements at full market value on the first January 1 after completion, with no prior-year value anchoring it, so the first full bill is usually much higher than the neighbourhood median suggests. The Save Our Homes three per cent cap and the ten per cent non-homestead cap do not protect year one; year two is the first capped year. If you already have a Florida homestead you can port up to five hundred thousand dollars of accumulated benefit, which is a real and under-used lever. Florida's homestead relief totals $51,411 of assessed-value reduction, and that figure is set by statewide Florida law rather than by Lee County or Cape Coral, with the additional portion not applying to school millage. As an illustration only, 15.3806 mills on a $450,000 taxable value is roughly $6,921 a year before any exemption, before the city's separate fire, stormwater and solid waste line items, and before the district assessment. We could not retrieve the current-year dollar rates for those city line items and we are not going to invent them.

Far northwest Cape Coral, in the last large undeveloped quadrant of the city: east of Burnt Store Road North, south of the Yucca Pens preserve, north of Wilmington Parkway, straddling Jacaranda Parkway West and reaching east toward Chiquita Boulevard North. Straight-line distances from the middle of the property, and these are straight-line and approximate rather than drive times: the Pine Island Road retail corridor at Burnt Store Road is about six miles, downtown Fort Myers about ten miles, downtown Cape Coral about eleven and a half, Cape Harbour about twelve and a half, the Sanibel Causeway about fourteen, Punta Gorda about fifteen, Boca Grande about fifteen, Fort Myers Beach about nineteen and the Southwest Florida International Airport about twenty miles. Punta Gorda being closer than downtown Fort Myers surprises people and tells you something true about where this is. Now the counterweight. Burnt Store Road is still two lanes north of Van Buren Parkway, which is exactly the segment fronting this community. In January 2026 Lee County approved only interim safety work on it: rumble stripes, two passing lanes of about a mile each and four-foot paved shoulders, at an estimated cost of about $5.7 million, with several months of environmental permitting and roughly nine months of construction ahead of it. Four-laning that segment is a top-tier county transportation priority but the funding for it has not been identified, and the state completed its study of the northern segment in August 2025. Segments further south were widened in 2018, 2020 and 2021. So the road will improve, and nobody can tell you when the stretch in front of this community gets four lanes. Budget your commute on two lanes and treat anything better as upside.

The School District of Lee County, and we are deliberately not naming an assigned school, for a reason that is genuinely useful rather than cautious. Lee County does not run the simple nearest-neighbourhood-school system most Florida counties do. It runs a zone-plus-choice system: your address places you in a large geographic attendance zone, and then you apply through the district's choice process, with placement driven by proximity and by seat availability rather than by a fixed address-to-school map. There is no guaranteed address-to-school mapping here, and anyone who hands you a confident list of assigned schools for an unbuilt community in Lee County is telling you something the district itself does not promise. Northwest Cape Coral sits in the district's West Zone, which covers roughly Cape Coral and North Fort Myers, and the honest headline about that zone is that it is filling up. As of September 2025 the district had just over 88,000 students in traditional public schools with thirty-four schools above their building capacity, and its own projections put enrolment near 107,000 by the mid 2030s. Its 2025 capital plan funds ten new schools and roughly fourteen thousand new student stations, though a full new West Zone high school is not currently in that plan. The district also moved in December 2025 to narrow choice options. All of which means that for a home delivered in 2027 or later, the schools your children attend cannot be known today. Use the district's own choice process once your address exists, and get the answer in writing before you commit to anything.

A great deal, and it is worth separating hard from soft, because a 1,732-acre entitlement allows far more than anybody has committed to build. What exists today is earthwork: graded roads and pads across three or more neighbourhood pods, five or more excavated stormwater lakes holding water, a spine-road corridor cut across the property, water and sewer mains being laid and pressure-tested, rock blasting underway and 1,277 addresses assigned. Nothing vertical. No amenity centre, no model, no sales office, no finished paved road. What the adopted entitlement allows, all of it a target subject to change: up to 3,500 dwellings of which up to 2,500 may be single-family, several hundred thousand square feet of retail and restaurant space, a substantial office allowance, a hotel, and designated sites for institutional uses. The commercial side is real enough to have its own issued environmental permit covering a couple of hundred acres, but it has no site plan and no tenant, so treat it as planned rather than coming. The entitlement does commit to some physical things worth knowing: a central spine road with connections to Burnt Store Road, Wilmington Parkway, Jacaranda Parkway and Chiquita Boulevard, sidewalks on both sides of the neighbourhood streets, bike lanes on both sides of the spine road, roughly seven hundred acres of preserves and wetlands retained, and the Yucca Pens preserve on the north boundary left undisturbed. What has not been published is an amenity programme. There is no announced clubhouse, pool, pickleball court or trail network, and we are not going to describe one. About a thousand of the 3,500 entitled dwellings are not allocated to single-family and have not been announced as anything: no site plan, no permit and no addressing exists for any of them. That is the accurate description, and anyone who tells you specifically what those thousand units will be is going beyond the record.

Because the next few milestones on this project arrive in a bundle, and the bundle is where the decisions happen. The phase one plat is the next real gate. When it records, the lot lines and dimensions become public, the 610 or so lots in that phase become actual parcels, a homebuilder gets named, model permits follow, and a price list appears not long after. Each of those is a moment when a buyer who already knows the ground can act and a buyer who finds out from a billboard cannot. Right now there is nothing to buy, no price to beat and no deposit to put down, so joining a list costs nothing and commits you to nothing. What it does is put you in front of a real estate professional licensed in Florida who represents you rather than the seller, before you put your own name on a builder's registration form, which is the one step in this process that is genuinely hard to undo. We will tell you when the plat records, when a homebuilder is announced, when the district publishes an assessment and when the first price appears.