Metro Heights

Metro Heights is a 1,200-home gated community going up on the Montebello Hills — 488 acres that were an operating oil field. Toll Brothers and Lennar are building it as a joint venture. Six model homes opened in October 2025 and the community is actively selling.

It is the largest residential project in this coverage area by a wide margin, and it is not infill. Everything else on the board is a parcel or two in a built-out downtown. This is a master plan on a hillside. About 173 to 225 acres carry the housing. Roughly 260 to 277 acres are set aside as a permanent habitat reserve. That ratio — more land conserved than built on — is the deal that made the project possible, and it took seventeen years and a trip through the appellate courts to get there.

What's being built

Up to 1,200 homes in two phases: about 349 in Phase A, about 851 in Phase B. The product runs from detached single-family through townhomes to condominium-style attached buildings of two to four stories. Homes run roughly 1,400 to 3,250-plus square feet. Pricing spans the high $800,000s to the low $2 millions depending on collection; Toll Brothers was marketing from about $1.29 million as of late 2025.

The two builders split the community into named collections. Toll Brothers has Skyview, Silverstone, and Viewpoint. Lennar has Vista, Meridian, Pinnacle/Ridgeview, and Crest. The exact unit split between the two at full build-out has not been published. No architect of record has been identified for the master plan or the individual collections — on merchant-built communities the builders' in-house design groups usually carry it, but that is not established in the public record.

The amenity program

• Staffed gated entry
• Recreation center of roughly 10,000 sq ft on about 3.5 acres — pools, spas, cabanas, fitness, event space, outdoor kitchens
• A five-acre public park
• Four pocket parks
• A scenic promenade
• Six trails

The site: an oil field

The Montebello Oil Field produced for decades. That history is the reason this land sat undeveloped inside Los Angeles County while everything around it filled in, and it shapes the project in two concrete ways. First, wells: existing wells have been abandoned or accommodated as development proceeds. Second, habitat: the undeveloped hillside became habitat for the coastal California gnatcatcher and the least Bell's vireo, both federally protected. That is what drove the conservation structure.

The environmental deal

This is the mechanism worth understanding, because it is what a 488-acre approval costs in California. Environmental review began in 2008 under SCH 2008011122 and produced a full Environmental Impact Report. The Specific Plan was approved by the Montebello City Council in 2015. Litigation followed, brought by environmental groups including the Sierra Club. A state appellate court affirmed the approvals in 2018, and the California Supreme Court later declined to review — which ended it.

On top of the state process sits a federal one. Metro Heights Montebello, LLC pursued a Habitat Conservation Plan and incidental take permits for Phase B, covering about 86.78 acres. An incidental take permit is federal authorization to harm protected species habitat in the course of otherwise lawful activity, granted only against a conservation plan. The mitigation combines preservation and management inside the on-site Habitat Reserve with off-site restoration in the Puente Hills and La Habra Heights area, documented through the Puente Hills Habitat Authority. The permanent reserve of roughly 260 to 277 acres is the consideration. More than half the site is never built.

Where it stands

Under construction and selling. Models are open at 425 Mariposa Way and both builders have collections in production. What is not established is delivery: how many homes have received certificates of occupancy, by phase, has not been published — marketing describes what is selling, not what is finished. The final status and acreage of the habitat reserve conservation easements, whether off-site mitigation is complete, the HOA fee structure, and the opening schedule for the recreation center and public park are all likewise unpublished.

What this signals

Large-lot greenfield still exists in this county, and it is former industrial land. Not farmland, not open space — an oil field. The parcels that were too complicated to develop in the 1980s are the ones delivering 1,200 homes now, because remediation economics finally cleared and because nothing easier is left.

The entitlement cost is measured in decades and acreage: seventeen years, a full EIR, appellate litigation through to a Supreme Court denial, a federal habitat conservation plan, and more than half the site conserved in perpetuity. Anyone looking at a large hillside parcel in the valley should read that as the price of admission, not as an unusual outcome. And two national public builders took it, not a regional one — projects at this scale and regulatory depth have moved beyond what regional developers finance.

Set against the rest of the valley pipeline, the contrast is stark: 1,200 units here against 56 in South Pasadena, 86 in Arcadia, 80 in San Gabriel. Metro Heights is several times the entire rest of the actively tracked pipeline. It is also the only one of them that will not repeat, because there is no second oil field.