How a new Pulte Florida agrihood makes conservation a buyer desire

For years, Central Florida’s exploding population growth and rapidly expanding suburban sprawl have clashed with local efforts to protect the region’s dwindling green space and undeveloped land. PulteGroup’s new 1,200-acre community on Orlando’s eastern edge aims to balance these seemingly contradictory interests. The community is called The Grow. Once undeveloped, rural land, the property is set to begin morphing into a roughly 2,200-home “agrihood” centered around a 9-acre working farm. In keeping with its conservation focus, the plan calls for reserving just over half of the site from development, including wetlands, conservation areas and shared green space. The Grow offers a potential case study in balancing growth and conservation, a tension deeply felt in Central Florida and many other high-growth Sun Belt markets. Between 2000 and 2025, the Orlando metro area’s population grew nearly 80%, from 1.64 million to 2.95 million. That growth reshaped once-rural communities on the region’s edges, replacing undeveloped land with new subdivisions, apartments and shopping centers. Many long-time Sunshine State residents now lament the loss of “Old Florida,” marked by a landscape of op...