Corkscrew Grove East Village

In the spring of 2026 the county commission approved this village unanimously, and the approval is more prescriptive than most people expect. It is not simply permission to build up to 4,502 homes on about 1,450 acres. It sets minimum proportions for the kind of housing that has to be built. At least a tenth of the homes must be single-family detached, at least a tenth must be attached homes or villas, and at least a tenth must be multifamily. A village here cannot legally be all large detached houses.

There is more in it than housing. The approval allows up to 300 senior living units, requires 362 workforce homes priced to the area median income, and permits roughly 239,000 square feet of commercial space plus up to another 100,000 square feet of self storage. A school site is reserved inside the plan, though no school has been named and no district commitment to build one has been published. The intent on paper is a place with its own shops and jobs rather than a subdivision that commutes somewhere else for everything.

This is worth weighing honestly rather than reading as a selling point or a drawback. A mixed community with apartments, attached homes, senior units and workforce housing is a different product from a gated enclave of detached houses, and buyers who assume the latter are sometimes surprised. Whether that mix appeals to you is a personal question. What is not a matter of opinion is that the mix is required, so nobody can quietly drop it later without going back to the county.

The land itself is the other half of the story. This was a working citrus grove until very recently, and the landowner wound down its own citrus production in 2025 after decades in the business. What is out there today is flat former grove and farmland, not a construction site. The photographs you will eventually see in marketing material will be of something that does not exist yet, which is normal at this stage and still worth saying out loud.

Buyers coming to Florida from elsewhere are often braced for a community development district, the familiar bond-funded assessment that shows up as a separate annual line. This project has something broader. The Florida legislature created a stewardship district over the whole master project in 2025, and it exists already, before a single home. It is not a homeowners association and it is not optional.

Its powers are worth reading plainly. It can issue bonds, and it can levy both benefit and maintenance special assessments. It can also levy a property tax of up to three mills for operations, although that particular power is locked until the district's board is elected by the residents and those residents approve the levy at a general election. Its remit covers water and sewer, roads, parks, school buildings, security, mosquito control, waste and health facilities. Its utility powers are explicitly subordinate to the existing public water and sewer district that already serves the area.

Here is the part that actually affects your budget, and the honest answer is that nobody knows yet. No assessment rate has been set, no district budget has been adopted and no bonds have been issued. The district is established and the numbers do not exist. Anyone who quotes you an annual district cost for this community today is guessing. What can be said with confidence is that the cost will not be zero, because districts of this kind are how the roads and utilities get financed in the first place.

The act that created it does one thing in a buyer's favour, and you should use it. It requires that the initial sales contract for a home here carry a disclosure of the district's assessments and taxes. That disclosure is the document to read slowly, and ideally to read before you are emotionally committed rather than at signing. Ask for the proposed assessment schedule and the capital plan behind it, and ask what the assumed bond term is. The difference between a modest maintenance assessment and a fully bonded capital assessment is the difference between a few hundred dollars a year and a few thousand.

No home here has ever been assessed, so there is no tax bill to show you and no honest way to produce one. What exists is the certified rate table for this county, and for rural land in this part of it the total runs around 12.2 mills, which is roughly 1.22 per cent of assessed value before any exemption. That figure includes the county levies, the school levies, the water management district and the general unincorporated services levy.

Two caveats sit on that number and we are not going to paper over either. The specific millage code that will apply to these parcels once they exist has not been established, and several of this county's local service levies apply only inside their own boundaries rather than countywide. Beautification and street lighting levies in this part of the county are examples. So treat 12.2 mills as the right order of magnitude for rural land here rather than as this community's future rate.

The exemptions are where most buyers mis-budget. Florida's homestead exemption and its assessment cap apply only to a permanent residence. If this is a second home or an investment, you get neither, and the cap that does apply to non-homestead property excludes the school portion of the bill. The school share is a substantial slice. Budget accordingly, and expect the taxable value to step up sharply in the first year after a home is completed, because land assessed as agricultural and land assessed as an improved homesite are not remotely the same number.

Then add the district. Whatever the millage turns out to be, the stewardship district assessment sits on top of it, and that figure does not exist yet. This is the single biggest unknown in anybody's cost estimate for this community, and it is the reason to be sceptical of any total annual cost number you see quoted before the district adopts a budget.

The local approval is the milestone that made the news, and it is genuinely the hard part politically. It is not the last approval. The state water management district and the federal government both have to permit this independently, and on this kind of land that process is substantive rather than procedural. The landowner's own public indication is that the state process runs through 2027 and the federal one into 2028.

That is where the construction estimate comes from. The 2028 or 2029 start date attached to this project is the landowner's own conditional projection, explicitly contingent on all approvals being granted, rather than a date any government has set. Large land conversions of this type frequently take longer than the first published estimate. We would treat 2028 as the earliest plausible start, not the expected one.

There was real public opposition, and it would be dishonest to leave it out. Around two dozen people spoke against the petition at the county hearing, mainly about Florida panther habitat and about traffic on rural roads. The commission approved it unanimously, and a major conservation organisation supported it because of the permanently protected land on the other side of the trade. We found no lawsuit filed. Approvals of this kind in this county have drawn legal challenges before, so it is a live question through the federal permitting rather than a closed one.