Coming to Clay County, FL
Agricola
Up to 4,000 homes approved on US 17, in unincorporated Clay County
Nothing has been released here yet and no builder has been named, so this page is the public record rather than a brochure. Three things in it are worth your time before anyone shows you a floor plan. The zoning bans lawns and private irrigation outright, on every private lot. The approval stops dead at 1,250 homes until a new commission vote. And more than a third of the approved units are multi-family. We have not seen any of it reported.
- Area
- Clay County, FL
- Approved
- Up to 4,000
- Acreage
- About 3,145
- Status
- Not yet launched
At a glance
Agricola fast facts
What the approval actually says, and what has not been released. Everything in the first column comes from the county's recorded approval documents and public agency records rather than from marketing, because there is no marketing yet.
- Area
- US Highway 17, near Green Cove Springs, FL
- Jurisdiction
- Unincorporated Clay County, not the city
- Developer
- BTI Partners, which builds no homes
- Approved for
- 4,000 homes on about 3,145 acres
- Of which multi-family
- 1,460 units, about 36 percent
- Hard stop until a new vote
- 1,250 homes
- Lawns and private irrigation
- Prohibited by the zoning
- Open space
- At least half the property
- Hurricane evacuation zone
- None. It is outside all of them
- Community district
- None exists yet
- Construction permits issued
- None. One conceptual application pending
- Homebuilder
- None namedGet notified
- Pricing and floor plans
- Not releasedGet notified
- Model opening date
- Not announcedGet notified
Figures come from the county's rezoning ordinance and the development standards attached to it, the executed form of the development agreement presented to the county commission, the planning staff report, the school district's own tentative facilities plan, the state water management district's permit records, federal and state flood and evacuation mapping, and the state insurance regulator, all as of September 2026. Millage is the most recently published certified year. Nothing here is a price, an offer, or a release date, because none has been published. All details are subject to change without notice.
Where it is
On US Highway 17 in unincorporated Clay County, with a Green Cove Springs mailing address and a county tax bill. A residential fly-in airpark adjoins it on the east and a solar farm forms its southern boundary. Drive the area yourself before you commit to anything.
What a local would tell you
The zoning bans lawns, and the approval stops dead at 1,250 homes
Most large Florida approvals bend the county's rules a little. This one replaced them. Rather than lot sizes and setback tables, the zoning here is a form-based code: eight settlement types and eight character districts that regulate buildings by their type and their frontage, with names like porch, stoop, courtyard and arcade, and minimum street-wall percentages in the denser districts. No variances were requested and none were granted, because a development of this kind supersedes the underlying code rather than varying it. What that means for you is that the rules you will live under are the ones in this approval, not the county's standard ones.
And the single most consequential of them is this, in the binding standards attached to the rezoning, essentially verbatim: no lawns or irrigation are permitted except within designated civic spaces, any irrigation of those civic spaces is limited to reclaimed water, and except for existing plants in open space areas all plants must be Florida native.
Read that slowly, because it is four rules in two sentences. No lawn on your lot at all, front or back. No private irrigation system, anywhere. Reclaimed water only for the shared greens. And native planting throughout. County planning staff restated the same language in their own recommendation, and the ordinance rezones the land expressly subject to those conditions, so this is regulatory text rather than a marketing promise. In practice: you will not own a mower, you will not have sprinklers, you will not have an irrigation line on your water bill, and the only mowed turf in the community will be in the shared squares. From the same table, one detail we enjoyed: clothes lines are prohibited in front and side yards and expressly permitted in rear yards. A community that bans your lawn and protects your right to hang laundry out back.
Now the number that should reset your expectations about scale. The development agreement provides highway access to serve up to the first 1,250 homes. Before the phase containing the 1,251st home, a transportation study must be run with methodology agreed by the county and the state transport department, and until an amendment to that agreement is approved by the county commission, residential development in or beyond that phase shall not commence. The phasing table makes the trigger exact: 450 homes in the first five years, 800 in the next five, which is 1,250 precisely. So the stop lands at the start of the third phase, somewhere around year eleven. Everything a first-decade buyer here would actually live in is bounded by 1,250 homes, not by 4,000.
The ceiling moves the other way too, and this is where reporting has it backwards. The developer may convert commercial entitlement into housing without a comprehensive plan amendment, a rezoning, a modification of the agreement or any other approval, on thirty days' written notice, capped at a cumulative 500 extra units. So the number can go from 4,000 to 4,500 by letter, not by vote. It cannot go past 4,500.
One more mechanism worth knowing, because it is the thing that usually goes wrong in a plan like this. Homes are gated on shops. Enough land for the non-residential square footage must be designated on an approved site plan in each of the first four phases before building permits issue for homes in the next one. The first phase has to site 30,000 square feet of office, light industrial or flex space and 22,500 square feet of commercial before second-phase homes get permits. That is the clause that stops the usual outcome where the town centre is always coming and never arrives.
So ask five things in writing before you commit: which character district your homesite sits in and what it permits; the recorded landscape and design standards that will govern your yard; who sits on the design review committee named in the zoning and what it can refuse; which phase your homesite is in and how it relates to the 1,250-home stop; and whether a community development district has been petitioned and at what assessment.
Know when the first construction permit is issued
That, not an announcement, is the moment this becomes real. Today there is one conceptual application pending and nothing else.
The record
Half the land stays open, no district exists yet, and nothing is permitted to be built
Start with how genuinely early this is, because it is easy to read an approval as a schedule. The rezoning was adopted in 2024 and the land changed hands later that year. As of September 2026 the state water management district holds exactly one permit record for this property: a conceptual stormwater application filed at the end of 2025, still pending after more than eight months. A conceptual permit authorises nothing to be built. There is no individual permit, no mass grading permit, no roadway permit, no recorded plat, no building permit and no homebuilder named on any document. The only public web presence for the project is an entitlement and advocacy page with no plans, no prices and no builders on it.
The contrast next door is the useful benchmark. The same developer's adjoining project has more than twenty permit sequences including issued permits for mass grading, collector roads and residential pods, and two national homebuilders already appear taking permit transfers there. Agricola has neither.
On open space, the headline is real but read the definition. The approved plan puts developed land at 40 to 50 per cent and open space at 50 to 60, and the development agreement commits that development is limited to a maximum of half the property and that a minimum of half will be set aside as project open space. The caveat, and it is a real one: that term is defined to include stormwater and wastewater facilities, utilities and roads. So half the property is not half parkland.
The harder and better number is the one underneath it. At buildout the approval commits a minimum of 320 acres of public recreation land, accessible to the public, delivered proportionally as each phase's homes complete, split into at least 160 acres of civic space, of which at least 22 acres must be active recreation, and at least 160 acres of remaining public recreation land. County staff confirmed both figures exceed the code minimum. Within the wider open space sit roughly 522 acres of wetlands and 472 acres of wetland buffers, and the approval requires an average hundred-foot buffer around protected wetlands, which staff said exceeds what the code and the comprehensive plan normally require.
Several other conditions shape daily life here. Where the community meets the existing rural roads on its boundary there must be a planted screen at eighty per cent opacity. Every phase pauses for both a historic and cultural resources study and a listed species survey that county staff must approve before it can start. Backyard chickens are conditionally allowed in the rural-character districts. And a community design review committee, named in the zoning itself, holds real approval power over several building types.
On costs, the honest answer is that the big one does not exist yet. No community development district has been established over this land: no petition, no boundary, no adopted budget, no assessment schedule. The development agreement contemplates one without requiring it, and the same developer's adjoining project already has one, so expect the question to be answered before the first lot closes rather than assuming the answer is no. What you can price today is the tax side: unincorporated Clay County runs about 15.02 mills against about 17.77 inside Green Cove Springs on the most recently published certified rates, so the county address saves roughly 2.75 mills, about $275 a year per $100,000 of taxable value. A county solid waste assessment of a few hundred dollars a year lands on the same bill.
What to ask for that is not published: the recorded development agreement and its book and page; whether a community development district has been petitioned and its proposed assessment; the status of the stormwater permit and what mitigation it will require; which phase and which character district your homesite sits in; the names of any homebuilders under contract; and the current county mobility fee and solid waste assessment for a home of your size.
The area
Outside every evacuation zone, and the school district has not planned for it
Start with the cleanest positive on this page, because it is verified and it is rare. We intersected the property boundary against the state emergency management division's statewide evacuation zone layer. This property is outside every Clay County hurricane evacuation zone. That layer definitively covers the county, holding seven separate Clay polygons, so the result is a real negative rather than a gap in the data. Very few large Florida approvals can say that.
On flooding, be precise rather than reassuring. Only two mapped zone types occur on this property: a special flood hazard area and an area of minimal hazard. There is no coastal zone and no wave zone. But the flood hazard area here comes from an approximate study with no base flood elevation determined: every polygon returns a null elevation, and querying the federal base flood elevation layer against this property returns nothing at all. No map revisions intersect it, and the maps governing this land took effect in 2014. So parts of this site are mapped floodplain, and when lots are released a lender determination and an elevation certificate will require a site-specific engineering study rather than a map lookup. Ask for your lot's flood zone, its base flood elevation once one is established, and its finished floor elevation, in writing.
On schools, we are not going to publish a zoned assignment, and you should be suspicious of anyone who does. The county school district publishes no public attendance-zone mapping service, and this land has been timberland with no residences, so zones will be drawn as growth lands. What the approval does say is worth knowing: no school site is dedicated. The district may, by written request, ask for up to forty developable acres for an elementary or middle school in a future phase, conveyed within 180 days of agreement on a location, with impact fee credits. That is conditional, not committed.
And then the finding that matters more than any of it. The district's own tentative five-year educational facilities plan shows zero new schools in years one through five. Five schools appear in the years six-to-ten and ten-to-twenty windows, every one of them with an opening year listed as to be determined, and every one attributed to other named developments. Agricola is not named anywhere in that plan. The district explains why in its own words: it is prioritising classroom additions in high-growth areas over new schools because construction costs have almost doubled. It also reports that about 34 per cent of its student stations are in portables, against an adopted service level of 110 per cent of capacity. That is the context for a 4,000-home approval, and it is checkable.
On roads, separate what is funded from what people talk about. Funded and complete or under way near this corridor: resurfacing on the highway south of the site, an intersection improvement, and completed expressway segments. Programmed for 2027: a new expressway interchange, still in pre-construction, and it is at the developer's other project rather than at this one. What is not funded is the point. There is no capacity project, no widening and no added lanes, on the highway anywhere near this site in the adopted work programme. Everything programmed on it near here is resurfacing, landscaping, sidewalk or a single intersection. The road that will carry the first 1,250 homes is scheduled to be repaved, not widened. The bypass people mention does not appear in the state work programme at all; it is being built privately at the adjoining project by that project's own district. And no interchange is programmed at this property.
On insurance, the state regulator's most recent report puts the average Clay County homeowners premium at about $2,540 including wind, measured in March 2026 and down slightly from the previous report, which sits below the neighbouring county to the north. It is a total divided by policies in force, so what you are charged varies with the insurer, the value, the deductible and the terms. Get a bindable quote on the specific address before your inspection period ends.
Finally, the neighbours, which nobody else writes down. County staff record that immediately to the east is a residential fly-in airpark with a planned recreational vehicle resort, and that the land use plan here was adjusted to keep open space along the airstrip's flight approach. The southern boundary is an existing utility-scale solar farm. To the north is the same developer's other large project. So on three sides: light aircraft on final approach over permanent open space, a solar array, and several thousand more approved homes under the same ownership. None of that is bad. All of it is worth seeing before you sign.
What you need to know
Buying new construction with someone on your side
When homes here are eventually released, the person at the sales desk will work for the builder. You can have a Florida agent on your side instead, touring with you, reading the contract line by line, and pushing for every incentive, upgrade and closing-cost credit on offer. It costs you nothing: on new construction the builder already budgets your agent's fee whether you bring one or not. The catch is timing. You usually need your own agent from the very first visit, or the builder will not recognise them and you lose it. That is exactly why an interest list is worth joining before a community opens rather than after.
On the developer's record, fairly and in both directions. BTI Partners is a land developer with a sixty-year operating history that buys land for cash, entitles it, builds the horizontal infrastructure and sells finished lots to national homebuilders. They have a dozen completed Florida projects and real builder relationships, and their own published framing is that they operate with a ten to fifteen year view. That is not a criticism, it is their stated model, and it is the single most useful thing to know about a page like this one.
The fact specific to this corridor is concentration. This developer controls both Agricola and the large project adjoining it to the north, roughly 6,500 acres in total under one master developer. The published acreage and unit figures for that adjoining project do not reconcile across the three sources that give them, so we are not going to publish a number for it. What is verifiable is that it is entitled, adjacent, under the same ownership, and already has two national homebuilders taking permit transfers while Agricola has none. If you buy here, that is who you will be competing with when you sell. We found no documented regulatory action or litigation in public search, but we did not have access to court dockets, so read that as an absence of found evidence rather than as a clean record.
When homes are eventually offered, the rest is the same as anywhere and it is not complicated: hire your own independent inspector at pre-drywall, again at final walkthrough, and once more before the one-year warranty expires. Read the limited warranty booklet before you sign rather than after. And read what the purchase agreement says about completion timing, price changes before closing, and dispute resolution.
Subdiview is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by BTI Partners, any homebuilder, any developer of Agricola, the City of Green Cove Springs, or Clay County. The developer is identified here because it is the developer of this community, which is a statement of fact and not a representation of any relationship. Community names and marks are the property of their respective owners and are used for identification only. Subdiview is operated by a real estate broker licensed in Illinois. We are not your agent, we do not represent you, and we perform no real estate brokerage services in this state. No one at Subdiview is licensed in this state. If you join an interest list, your information is referred to a real estate professional licensed in the state where the property is located, who will contact you directly. We are compensated by that professional's brokerage, not by you. Pricing, plans, inventory, district, tax and approval details on this page carry the dates shown, are as published, proposed or reported rather than committed, and are subject to change without notice.
Questions and answers
Agricola FAQ
What is Agricola?
It is a large approved but entirely unbuilt master plan on US Highway 17 in unincorporated Clay County, about 3,145 acres rezoned in 2024 for up to 4,000 homes, 100 hotel rooms, a million square feet of office and light industrial, 640,000 square feet of post-secondary education use and 340,000 square feet of commercial, built out over thirty years in six five-year phases. The land was bought in 2024 by BTI Partners, a land developer rather than a homebuilder: their business is entitling land, building the roads and utilities and selling finished lots to homebuilders. No homebuilder has been named, no lot exists, no plat is recorded, and no construction permit has been issued. The only permit application in existence is a conceptual stormwater review filed at the end of 2025 and still pending.
Is it in Green Cove Springs or in the county?
Unincorporated Clay County, all of it, and here that works in your favour. The mailing address will say Green Cove Springs and that will mislead people about the tax bill. Three records agree that none of the land is inside the city: the rezoning was adopted by the county commission under the county's own development code, which could not have been done to a city parcel; the property boundary intersected against the state's municipal boundary layer returns no municipal polygon at all, while the Green Cove Springs polygon exists in that layer and does not touch it; and water and sewer come from the county utility authority rather than the city utility. On the most recently published certified rates, unincorporated Clay County runs about 15.02 mills against about 17.77 inside Green Cove Springs, so a city address would cost roughly 2.75 more mills, about $275 a year for every $100,000 of taxable value. Add a county solid waste assessment of a few hundred dollars a year on the same bill.
Is it true that lawns are not allowed?
Yes, and it is stronger than you have probably heard. The zoning standards attached to the rezoning ordinance say, in terms, that no lawns or irrigation are permitted except within designated civic spaces, that any irrigation of those civic spaces is limited to reclaimed water, and that except for existing plants in open space areas all plants must be Florida native. That is four rules in two sentences: no lawn on your lot, front or back; no private irrigation system at all; reclaimed water only for the shared greens; and native planting everywhere. It is binding rather than aspirational, because the ordinance rezones the property expressly subject to the conditions in that document, and county planning staff restated the same language in their recommendation. In practice you will not own a mower, you will not have sprinklers, and the only mowed turf in the community will be in the shared squares and greens. One more detail from the same table, for balance: clothes lines are prohibited in front and side yards and permitted in rear yards.
Is it really going to be 4,000 homes?
Eventually, over thirty years, and with two important qualifications. The first is a hard stop. The development agreement provides highway access to serve up to the first 1,250 homes, and before the phase containing the 1,251st home a transportation study must be run with methodology agreed by the county and the state transport department. Until an amendment to that agreement is approved by the county commission, residential development in or beyond that phase may not begin. The phasing table makes the trigger exact: 450 homes in the first five years and 800 in the next five, which is 1,250 precisely. So everything a first-decade buyer here would experience is bounded by 1,250 homes, not 4,000. The second qualification runs the other way. The developer may convert commercial entitlement to residential without a comprehensive plan amendment, a rezoning, a modification of the agreement or any other approval, on thirty days' written notice, capped at a cumulative 500 extra units. So the ceiling can move from 4,000 to 4,500 by letter rather than by vote, and it cannot move past 4,500.
How much of it is apartments?
More than most buyers picture. The approved mix is 2,170 detached single-family homes, 370 duplexes and townhomes, and 1,460 multi-family units, so multi-family is about 36 per cent of the 4,000 units. Overall density works out at about 3.1 units per gross developed acre. That is not a criticism, it is what a walkable mixed-use plan looks like and it is exactly what the county approved. But if you are imagining a conventional single-family master plan, roughly a third of this one is not that. Note also that most of the multi-family allocation sits in later phases, so the first five years look different from the finished picture.
Will there be a community district assessment?
Almost certainly, but none exists yet and we will not invent a number. As of September 2026 there is no community development district over this land: no petition, no creating instrument, no boundary, no adopted budget and no assessment schedule. The development agreement contemplates one without requiring it, providing that open space may be conveyed to one or more community development districts or property owner associations. And the same developer's adjoining project already has one, which appears as a co-permittee on its stormwater permits, so this developer plainly uses them in this corridor. When a petition is filed it will state the acreage and the proposed assessment, and that is the document to ask for. Do not assume the answer is that there will be none.
Be first in line
Get on the Agricola interest list
We will send you what gets released as it gets released: the first homebuilder named, the first construction permit issued, pricing and floor plans, the lot map and homesite premiums, the community district assessment once one exists, and the model opening date. And we will connect you with a real estate professional licensed in Florida who represents you rather than the seller, and who can register you before your first visit.
It costs nothing, creates no brokerage relationship by itself, and does not obligate you to anything.