It’s my great pleasure to share with you some exciting news: Mattamy Homes will serve as the master developer of Newfield, the innovative new town in Palm City that I first proposed to the people of Martin County more than five years ago, and which is now nearing the start of construction.   

And I’m equally pleased to tell you that I will remain engaged in Newfield, advising Mattamy on fulfilling my vision and helping their talented executives in every way I can. So will several key members of my local team of professionals—planners, engineers, and consultants—who helped me design this innovative new town, which will be like nothing else ever built on the Treasure Coast. The plan for Newfield is the antithesis of conventional suburban sprawl, and it will broaden housing and lifestyle choices in Martin County.     

Newfield is a labor of love for me – one that has brought me great joy, and I am convinced that Mattamy, with its great track record around America, is the right developer to bring Newfield to fruition. Newfield will rise on land that my family owned for more than 40 years, and I’m pleased that this land will now have wonderful new uses, including its original agricultural use and conservation. 

Mattamy Homes–the largest closely held homebuilder in North America–is experienced in Newfield’s kind of plan, called Traditional Neighborhood Design (TND), with a compact, walkable town center and a mix of housing types and sizes, interspersed with small-scale retail, village greens, schools, civic buildings and a neighborhood farm.    

When I was seeking a master developer for Newfield, I was impressed with Mattamy’s ongoing work at Celebration, the highly acclaimed TND community created by the Walt Disney company over the past 25 years near Orlando. Disney, with its high standards for design and construction, chose Mattamy to create the last phase of Celebration, called Island Village, a 350-acre mixed-use town with various kinds of homes, stores and a new elementary school.     

“Newfield will introduce a new standard for TND and open-space preservation on the Treasure Coast,” says my colleague Dan Grosswald, Mattamy’s Southeast Florida Division president, with whom my team and I will be working closely. “Newfield will be a multigenerational, pedestrian-friendly community that will appeal to a wide variety of current and future Martin County residents,” from young families to empty nesters. 

Mattamy’s deep financial resources and large, experienced team of professionals, assisted by my team and me, will ensure that my bold concepts for Newfield will be realized over the next decade of gradual development. At its completion, Newfield will have some 4,200 residential units of various types, sizes and prices, including single-family detached homes, townhouses, condos and apartments in small buildings. (All of these will honor Martin County’s four-story height limit, of course.)  

Beginning in 2017, I worked closely with Martin County residents and our country government to win approval in 2020 for a whole new zoning category to enable Newfield to be built. Newfield’s Phase 1 will encompass 139 acres, including the new town center, with 1,250 residential units, neighborhood retail, restaurants, small-scale offices, recreational amenities, and ten miles of trails–plus the county’s first gopher tortoise preserve. 

I extended public water and sewer lines out Citrus Boulevard to the site of the Newfield town center last fall and winter, so utilities are in place. Next, Mattamy’s contractors will begin creating new lakes and waterways south of Citrus Boulevard, for recreation and stormwater retention. Fill from those waterways will be used to elevate the town center and other neighborhoods north of Citrus Boulevard. Groundbreaking is expected later this year, with homes sales to begin in the fall of 2023. The first homes are slated for delivery in early 2024.  

To promote walkability and community connection, Newfield neighborhoods will include many homes with front porches set at a comfortable “conversational distance” from the sidewalk, enabling residents to greet neighbors from the front porch and watch their children play safely in the front yard. (Most garages will be behind the homes, so the sidewalk is not cut with front driveways.) 

Of Newfield’s 3,400 total acres (more than five square miles), about 70% (2,300-some acres), will remain as open space–parks, playing fields, a 70-acre working farm with livestock, a citrus grove, wooded hiking, biking and equestrian trails, pastures, wetlands, lakes and canals.  

The most natural, never-touched lands—dense pinelands, wetlands, saw palmetto and sabal palms–will be protected forever in the new Kiplinger Conservancy, which will be more than twice the size of our county’s largest park, Halpatiokee, off Kanner Highway along I-95. The Conservancy will include equestrian trails and pastures with trailheads for access from the neighboring horse communities of Palm City Farms (along Busch Street) and Stuart West, across from Newfield’s northwest corner.  

There will also be a new employment district in the triangle of land between the Florida Turnpike and Boatramp Avenue, with plenty of space for light-industrial uses (light manufacturing, research & development), office parks and warehouse distribution centers, bringing good jobs to Martin County.  

More About Mattamy Homes: 

Mattamy Homes is the largest privately owned homebuilder in North America, with 40-plus years of history across the United States and Canada. Every year, Mattamy helps more than 8,000 families realize their dream of homeownership. In the United States, the company is active in 11 markets — Dallas, Charlotte, Raleigh, Phoenix, Tucson, Jacksonville, Orlando (where its U.S. head office is located), Tampa, Sarasota, Naples and Southeast Florida. In Canada, Mattamy Homes’ communities stretch across the Greater Toronto Area as well as Ottawa, Calgary and Edmonton. Visit www.mattamyhomes.comfor more information.